Some months ago I was contacted by the producers of a well known German science programme called Nano, which is broadcast on channel ZDF. They were recording a segment for the show on citizen science, and were keen to talk to me about the Milky Way Project. I was happy to help, they visited, we chatted, I walked up and down corridors and through doors, they filmed, and went on their way. The item was finally shown on Nano last week, on 7 September, and they did a great job showcasing our amazing images. You can watch the video for a couple more days here, and an accompanying article can be found on this webpage – these all in German. And yes, that’s me, at my desk in Heidelberg.
Milky Way Project is just one of the projects featured on the programme. I particularly like Artigo, one of the other projects featured. The aim of Artigo is to tag images of artworks, to enable catalogues of artwork to become more searchable. Artigo is set up like a game: two users are simultaneously shown the same image, and they’re asked to type in words that describe an aspect of the work they’re looking at. The users then score points based on the tags they enter: 0 points for a tag that’s never been entered for this image, 25 points if the other player has entered the same work in that session, and 5 points for a word that has previously been entered by another user.
It’s a really neat idea and quite a different approach to classifying images than is used by the Zooniverse projects. The attractive thing about a game approach is that the user gets immediate feedback on how they’re doing. I know that many MWP users regularly ask for feedback on their classifications. The problem with giving feedback, however, is that we don’t want to bias the users towards any particular kind of bubble drawings – we want you to tell us what a bubble looks like. Artigo gets rounds this very nicely by giving feedback based on what other users think, rather than what the art historians think.
This post is part of Citizen Science September at the Zooniverse.
The Milky Way Project Blog 