Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation

Project Information

ECSAnVis

Grant agreement ID: 694767

DOI

10.3030/694767

Project closed

EC signature date 31 October 2016

Start date 1 November 2016

End date 31 July 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ECSAnVis (Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation)

Reporting period: 2021-05-01 to 2022-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The challenge of Extreme Citizen Science (ECS) is to enable any community, regardless of literacy or education, to initiate, run, and use the result of a local citizen science activity, so they can be empowered to address and solve issues that concern them. In this context, citizen Science is understood as the participation of members of the public in a scientific project: shaping the research question, collecting the data, analysing it and using the knowledge that emerges from it. The project "Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation" (ECSAnVis) focused on the development of geographical analysis and visualisation tools that can be used, successfully, by people with limited literacy, in a culturally appropriate way. At the core of the project is imperative to see technology as part of socially embedded practices and culture, and avoid ‘technical fixes’.

The development of a novel, socially and culturally accessible Geographic Information System (GIS) interface and underlying algorithms, is aimed at providing communities with tools to support them to combine their local environmental knowledge with scientific analysis to improve environmental management. The project included the collaboration with local indigenous partners on case studies in critically important, yet fragile and menaced ecosystems in different locations. An interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has developed innovative hardware, software and participatory methodologies that will enable any community to use this novel solution.

The research is contributing novel methodologies and tools to the fields of geography, information science, anthropology, development, and conservation.

The overall objectives of the project were to:
1. Understand the social and technical requirements for the incorporation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in GIS and geographical technologies, and define the process to capture and import locally situated requirements.
2. Develop participatory methods and tools to create geographical visualisations suitable for non-literate users or those with very little technical expertise, in ways that provide useful information for the community, as well as opportunities to share information with trusted intermediaries.
3. Test the tools in situ, and understand the organisational, technological, and societal support that such tools require to be used effectively.
4. Develop the methodology to achieve socially-integrated technological development, incorporating ethical considerations and the Responsible Research and Innovation framework into a set of practical engagement methodologies as well as technical codes that are integrated into the software and hardware.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the course of the project, the following work took place:

The project started with understanding the contextual information that is necessary to develop the technology. This was done through anthropological research that is aimed at providing the context for technological development, and the baseline for evaluation of the project as a whole. This provided comprehensive requirements for the analysis and visualisation tool that is suitable for TEK. A multi-scale examination of the application will be carried out, starting with the end-users – focusing on social organisation and kinship, political relationships inside the community and beyond, ecological ontologies and knowledge representation, geographical awareness and use of spatial information and other relevant local issues. Here, work has identified locations for collaboration with detailed projects developing in 20 sites and communities. In each of these cases, an anthropologist with detailed familiarity with the community in question visited and engaged in a process of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), leading to the establishment of a community protocol. Because participants have limited literacy, the project established an approach of video recording the community protocol, so the video can be used for future reference.

The case studies supported the exploration of different technological developments. We have established a process of recruitment and engagement. Finally, work progressed in creating data collection and visualisation tools, establishing an early prototype to visualise the results of data collection in the field.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Despite the challenges of Covid-19, which impacted the last two years of the project significantly, the project has achieved significant progress beyond state of the art.

ECSAnVis achieved several scientific developments: the development and evaluation of a digital-only interface and a mixed physical and digital interface; longevity, scale, and creativity in indigenous communities’ participation in ecological data collection; new learning from the experiences of anthropologists, geographers and computer scientists working together; and methodological development of working with low literacy communities in London to test techniques that will be used with remote communities.

The most substantive contribution of the project is the demonstration, through 20 case studies, that it is possible to engage any community, regardless of literacy, in designing and implementing citizen science projects. This requires attention, resources, and dedicated effort. However, given such resources, any community can actively participate in the creation of high-quality scientific knowledge.

The implementation of the Tap&Map with an interface that mixes digital and physical objects demonstrated that using physical objects helped in higher accuracy in data collection - a critical issue in citizen science. In another technical breakthrough, we demonstrated that low literacy participants can capture and describe polygons (areas) over aerial imagery, and share it through a social networking app.

Secondly, the range of case studies allowed the ECSAnVis team to have an emerging dataset that has the longevity and scale to be used as a basis for visualisation experiments. The case study in Maasai Mara led to the collection of nearly 3000 data points over an extensive area. The case study in Cameroon has been providing continuous data collection for over 3 years about wildlife crime and animal monitoring. We have also developed the first recorded case of a collaboration between Eco-guards and indigenous groups.

Third, while some of the origins of the field of Human-Computer Interaction are linked to the work of anthropologists, the field is now not directly linked to social anthropology practice. Within ECSAnVis expeditions, we had cases of a team of anthropologists carrying out a usability engineering experiment, and other interdisciplinary collaborations. These studies bring up new insights about the methodologies to carry out such studies in the field with indigenous groups in a culturally-appropriate way.

Finally, we have established a process of recruitment and engagement that allows us to carry out London-based experiments with digitally illiterate participants. The work attracted much attention as a methodology to carry out early experimentation that can work across the Global North/South divide. We have also initiated new ways of remote collaboration even when case studies are carried out in remote and less connected places during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Two Maasai warriors photograph an Olpopongi tree (Euphorbia Candelabrum) (Credit: Megan Laws_

Experimenting with data visualisation at the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia (credit: Megan Laws)

A Baka Indigenous person and an ecoguard (park ranger) working together (Credit: Fabien Moustard)

ECSAnVis case studies

Map visualisation experiments at the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia (Credit: Megan Laws)