We are excited
to have our Cicada paper submission accepted in CHI 2014. I believe the paper
can be found in Southampton’s e-prints archive but if not drop me
(or any of the authors) a line and I will send it to you.
Moran, S., Pantidi, N., Rodden, T. A., Chamberlain,
A., Griffiths, C., Zilli, D., Merrett, G., and Rogers, A. (2014). Listening to the Forest and its Curators:
Lessons Learnt from a Bioacoustic Smartphone Application Deployment To appear
in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(CHI ’14). ACM Press.
Abstract: Our
natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of
species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their
preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the
deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our
findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a
tension between the technology and their established working practices. From
our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing
citizen science apps.
Our paper contributes to the broader research agenda of
Sustainability and Citizen Science that is growing bigger every year in Human
Computer Interaction. There have been a number of publications in the last few
years that involve citizens actively taking part in recording various
environmental factors such as air pollution, water quality and traffic patterns
with off- the-shelf or customised tools on their mobile phones or home
infrastructure (participatory sensing). This is a complementary approach to
traditional Citizen Science approaches where individuals contribute to
analysing or classifying data online (see for example http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ or http://folding.stanford.edu/) and to
work that uses serious games for behavioural change and raising awareness (for
example http://www.gamesforchange.org/ and http://www.enercities.eu/project/).
I have included a selection of papers on this subject from last year’s CHI (see
links below) for those interested in the domain. More can be found in the
References section of our paper and both Stuart and I are happy to provide more
to anyone who might be interested.
Virtual Birding: Extending
an Environmental Pastime into the Virtual World for Citizen Science
A Conversation Between
Trees: What Data Feels Like In The Forest
inAir: A Longitudinal
study of Indoor Air Quality Measurements and Visualizations