Research for and with the Public in 6 New Top Citizen Science Projects

This Citizen Science project is taking place in a particularly exciting environment: at school. A school has everything that viruses need to spread, especially a lot of people in a small space. During the project, which will last several months, researchers will work together with students to set up a transdisciplinary research project intended to gain an even better understanding of the transmission and spread of viruses through the air. The researchers bring medical, epidemiological, and sociological expertise and experience, while the students bring curiosity and an open mind. “As our cooperation partners, the students are very closely involved in the whole process,” says Andreas Bergthaler, virologist at the MedUni Vienna, who is leading the project. “This means that we develop the research design together, plan the experiments, set up the air filters, collect and analyze the samples together, and so on. In the end, the students will also be named as co-authors of the publication.” As the project is transdisciplinary, social science methods will also be used to investigate any social conditions that are epidemiologically relevant. This project is also exceptional in another respect: It makes itself the subject of research. The results will also be incorporated into the students’ minor theses, a paper high school students are required to write before graduation. Whether all of the young participants go on to pursue a career in science is not the point: “Ultimately, projects like this are about communicating with the next generation,” says Bergthaler. “Regardless of the topic, we want to show them how science works and how to deal with complex issues. I’m convinced that this is important for society as a whole, not only to interest young people in a career in research."

There is hardly anyone who would not like to eat a healthy and climate-friendly diet. But why are intentions and reality often so far apart when it comes to food? In SUNRISE – a project from the Sustainable Food Systems funding program – this question is being investigated by the residents and staff of a care home. They will use photos to record examples of successful sustainable meals and examples of unsustainable meals in their everyday lives. In a second step, the participants will conduct interviews to find out more from colleagues and roommates. This data will be analyzed jointly by the participants and researchers. At the end of the two-year project, the aim is to produce guidelines that will help to make nutrition in care homes more sustainable. “Through the collaborative research with residents and staff, we hope to discover a completely new view of sustainability and uncover mechanisms that we would otherwise overlook,” says Doris Eglseer from the Medical University of Graz, who is leading the project. “It's a great opportunity for research.” The SUNRISE project completes the “Opinion Lab” (Open Innovation Nursing Lab) project, which focuses on improving the quality of life in nursing homes. “Even during this project, the desire for more sustainable food was a very important issue for the residents. Many would like to do more, for example to reduce waste,” says Eglseer. “The scientific community has issued guidelines, but they have had limited success. I’m convinced that guidelines from practitioners will have a much better chance of being implemented.” The dietician and nursing scientist is also certain that a great deal of knowledge about sustainability is available but unused in nursing homes. “Many generations live and work there under one roof, people who have skills and knowledge that can be very important for science and also for a more sustainable future.” The Sustainable Food Systems funding program is part of a joint initiative with austria wirtschaftsservice (aws) and is financed by the Fonds Zukunft Österreich.

The acronym CS4SEHAG stands for “Citizen Science for SEHAG” (sensitivity of high alpine geosystems to climate change since 1850) and is as ambitious as it sounds. In the SEHAG project, international researchers from various disciplines are jointly investigating the effects of climate change in the Alps in order to reconstruct the changes since industrialization and to be able to make the most accurate forecasts possible for future developments. Photogrammetry plays a special role here, as it can be used to gain insights into changes in the Alpine regions from various images. SEHAG uses historical photos, aerial photographs (airplanes and drones), and comprehensive laser scans. Despite this multitude of methods, there are still gaps in the observation of current changes. The CS4SEHAG project now aims to close these gaps with the help of citizen scientists: “The effects of the changes caused by climate change are often very localized and not so obvious. This is why we hope to document these soon, with the help of the local population,” says Norbert Pfeifer, who is involved in SEHAG as Head of the Photogrammetry Unit at TU Wien and who also heads CS4SEHAG. In the Citizen Science project, the inhabitants of two alpine valleys, the Kaunertal (Austria) and the Martelltal (Italy), are invited over the next two summers to use their smartphones to take pictures of their surroundings and share them with the researchers. “People's connection to their valleys and their local knowledge are very valuable to us,” says Sebastian Mikolka-Flöry, who is responsible for evaluating the visual data in the project, among other things. “The more photos we get, the better it is.” When analyzing the photos, the exact position and orientation of the camera are calculated and evaluated together with the other data sets in order to document changes as accurately and completely as possible. “It is often local citizens who point out certain changes on the ground. Through the CS4SEHAG project, we can give them a tool to document and share these observations. I hope that we will create kind of an ‘aha effect,’ especially through the historical comparison, because then the extent of the changes will suddenly become visible, even for the people who live there,” says Mikolka-Flöry. The researchers also hope that the project will help to correct a skewed perception of research: “We don't just come and take data away, but we, the researchers and the population, are part of the project together. This is perhaps also a way of addressing the current state of alienation between science and society.”

Often, not even the people who work with and conduct research using artificial intelligence (AI) really know what it actually “understands” about the world and how AI interprets data and makes decisions. “Artificial intelligence applications that are trained with data are usually a kind of black box. They produce results, but it remains unclear which criteria these results are based on,” says Michael Pucher from the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. This citizen science project aims to test whether the obscure black box that AI currently is can become an “explainable artificial intelligence” (XAI). The tool the researchers are using is language, or more precisely: Austrian dialects. “From our work on dialect synthesis, we know how a computer produces dialects. Now we want to investigate how an XAI identifies dialects and distinguishes them from other dialects by comparing its approach with that of humans,” says Pucher. The research team will develop a web app that people can interact with to identify dialects and assign them to Austrian regions in a virtual competition with an AI. The human citizen scientists will explain their decisions to the researchers, providing them with information about their decision-making process. Accordingly, the XAI will be designed to allow largely transparent and understandable decision-making processes, otherwise the comparison would not be possible. The AI alerts the human citizen scientists to frequencies in a speech sample that it considers important, for example. What is relevant for AI may be completely irrelevant for citizen scientists when classifying dialects. Pucher: “It’s this comparison between artificial and human decision-making processes that is so exciting for us. But we’re also convinced that the participants will get something out of it by having an opportunity to try out their language skills, maybe learning something new about their own dialects, and gaining an insight into AI development.”

What happens when scientists leave the interpretation of data to people who are not “experts”? This Citizen Science project “Understanding Racism” is about the interpretation of interviews with workers from Eastern European countries living in Austria and their experiences of racial discrimination. The sociologists conducting the one-year project want to find out how other people from different backgrounds interpret these interviews and, in particular, any experiences of discrimination. “The overarching research project for this Citizen Science project focused on the question of why Eastern European migrants often work below their qualification level. We were repeatedly told about experiences of discrimination, but often, these people weren’t even sure whether they had experienced discrimination at all,” explains Clara Holzinger from the University of Vienna, who is carrying out the project together with Anna-Katharina Draxl, also from the University of Vienna. Who decides what is discrimination and what is not, and on which grounds? Qualitative social research usually attempts to take a “subjective” view of the social world and has developed a number of methods for this purpose. But why not give others the power of interpretation? The sociologists are daring a methodological experiment: “We know from the classroom that it we can learn a lot from interpreting the interviews with students, so I’m really looking forward to hearing the approaches and interpretations chosen by the citizen scientists in the workshops. As these people often have a migrant background themselves, we will not just be talking about them and interpreting how they are doing, but actively involving them in our work. This will also take us a major step forward in our methodology,” says Anna-Katharina Draxl. The project is a complement to the existing project “Investigating the social construction of deskilling among 'new' EU migrants in Vienna,” which focuses on racism and qualifications, a largely unexplored topic in the context of Eastern European labor migration. Both projects are headed by Elisabeth Scheibelhofer, a sociologist at the University of Vienna, who says, “Citizen science is more than just escaping the ivory tower. Involving stakeholders is particularly relevant for the social sciences, as the aim is to gain as comprehensive an understanding of the social world as possible.”

Sometimes it’s a date inscribed on a beam; sometimes a motto, a dedication, or the name of the stonemason: Inscriptions on and in buildings are the theme of “Communities Intertwined.” This Citizen Science project aims to record inscriptions found in private homes and public spaces and make them accessible to researchers. “Inscriptions are special because, unlike old documents and manuscripts, they are intended to be read in a specific place. This means they also provide the context in which they are to be read,” says Andreas Zajic. The historian from the Austrian Academy of Sciences is heading the project, which focuses on medieval and early modern inscriptions found in Klosterneuburg. “In our 'Premises' project, we were able to use the inscriptions to trace long-term exchange processes between the townspeople and Klosterneuburg Abbey,” says Zajic. “Now, with the help of the experts based in Klosterneuburg, we want to discover inscriptions in the urban space, which reflect further historical interactions between 'inside' the monastery and 'outside' in the city.” The project invites the current residents of the city’s historic buildings to go on the hunt for traces of history and find out what an inscription reveals about the history of their house and their city. “The citizen scientists’ knowledge and our previous research complement each other in many ways. We can only learn of the historical significance of individual buildings through information from the public. By examining the written sources, land registers, and documents from the monastery, we, on the other hand, may know some details about the history of a building that the owners or residents don't,” says Zajic. Historical studies can generally benefit from collaboration with non-academics and laypeople, as this is the only way to answer more complex research questions. “This project will be reaching a broad, interested audience and will strengthen our collaboration with the city's residents,” says German studies expert Sarah Deichstetter, who will moderate the dialog and exchange and make the results accessible to a wider public. “Inscriptions in private buildings are often surprising, as there is no systematic preliminary work in this direction. It’s not unusual for the inscriptions in private buildings to be inaccessible, so they can only be discovered in cooperation with citizen scientists.” In this sense, “Communities Intertwined” will not only open up new approaches for historians and urban research, but also for the inhabitants of these cities.