Zooniverse is a self-proclaimed platform for people-powered research. This unique website connects citizen scientists — you — with professional researchers, to promote collaboration and discovery using vast catalogs of data.
It’s not just astronomy and physics that have benefited from this amazing platform. Zooniverse’s diverse project categories include biology, history, climate science, the arts, medicine, ecology, and the social sciences. If you grow tired of studying transit data from the Kepler space telescope (Exoplanet Explorers:
exoplanetexplorers.org) or characterizing glitches in the LIGO instruments to improve gravitational wave detection (Gravity Spy:
gravityspy.org), you can easily switch to counting Weddell seals in Antarctica’s Ross Sea (Weddell Seal Count:
www.zooniverse.org/projects/slg0808/weddell-seal-count). Or perhaps sorting through fragments of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean texts dating from the 10th to 13th centuries is more your style (Scribes of the Cairo Geniza:
www.zooniverse.org/projects/judaicadh/scribes-of-the-cairo-geniza).
Regardless of the projects you choose to explore, you’ll be taking part in scientific research alongside some 1.6 million volunteers around the world. “Zooniverse is inclusive. It’s about discoveries we can make together,” says Chris Lintott, Zooniverse’s founder and principal investigator, and professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford.
Founded in 2007, Zooniverse is a collaboration between the Adler Planetarium, the University of Oxford, and the broader Citizen Science Alliance. Over the past 10 years, the platform has grown from a single project to over 125 current and completed “zoos” that connect professional researchers with citizen volunteers to produce otherwise unattainable results.
A galaxy zoo
Just like its name, Zooniverse began with a zoo. In 2007, Lintott developed Galaxy Zoo, calling upon volunteers to look at digital images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and classify them as spirals, ellipticals, or mergers. There are a lot of galaxies in the universe, posing a challenge for astronomers who need to classify data sets rich with millions of them. When he was a graduate student at Oxford, Kevin Schawinski, an original team member, spent a month doing nothing but classifying galaxies for roughly 12 hours a day, topping out at about 50,000.