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'/Command' and Conquer: Analysing Discussion in a Citizen Science Game

Published: 28 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Citizen science is changing the process of scientific knowledge discovery. Successful projects rely on an active and able collection of volunteers. In order to attract, and sustain citizen scientists, designers are faced with the task of transforming complex scientific tasks into something accessible, interesting, and hopefully, engaging. In this paper, we examine the citizen science game EyeWire. Our analysis draws up a dataset of over 4,000,000 completed game and 885,000 chat entries, made by over 90,000 players. The analysis provides a detailed understanding of how features of the system facilitate player interaction and communication alongside completing the gamified scientific task. Based on the analysis we describe a set of behavioural characteristics which identify different types of players within the EyeWire platform.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WebSci '15: Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference
    June 2015
    366 pages
    ISBN:9781450336727
    DOI:10.1145/2786451
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 28 June 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. Citizen Science
    2. Gamification
    3. Online Communities
    4. Player Behaviour

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    WebSci '15
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    WebSci '15: ACM Web Science Conference
    June 28 - July 1, 2015
    Oxford, United Kingdom

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    • (2019)Scientific Discovery Games for Biomedical ResearchAnnual Review of Biomedical Data Science10.1146/annurev-biodatasci-072018-0211392:1(253-279)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Efficient, but Effective?Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33592793:CSCW(1-35)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
    • (2019)Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CIG.2019.8848079(1-8)Online publication date: Aug-2019
    • (2017)From Crowd to CommunityProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998302(2137-2152)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
    • (2017)An investigation of player motivations in Eyewire, a gamified citizen science projectComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.07473:C(527-540)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2017
    • (2016)Because science is awesomeProceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science10.1145/2908131.2908151(45-54)Online publication date: 22-May-2016

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