From curiosity to research
Feb 2024 - ongoing
Citizen science involves the public in scientific projects. While this often means helpt with data collection (e.g. bird counting), in this project we focussed on a higher level of involvement.
Before data collection, the scientists obviously conceived of a research question that they would like to answer. Perhaps an hypothesis is formulated, or the project aims are more exploratory, but there is always some kind of motivating research question. Pauline ten Hagen wanted to specifically involve the public at this stage of doing science: the formulation of research questions. Museum collections, which are becoming increasingly digitised, represent a vast and untapped resource for fascinating research and exploration. Involving the public thus seems a great idea to explore these possibilities but how to let the public meet up to the years of training of scientists? How to help them formulating research questions that could really contribute to the scientific investigation of online collections? Paulien ten Hagen came up with a simple but super effective solution: train a chatbot to serve as a virtual scientific sparring partner. This definitely needs a follow up as we hardly tapped into the unexplored potential.
Online repository can be found here.