EOSC Future pioneered the facilitation of citizen science by providing access to research data and services for two citizen science projects. These novel openings helped to promote best practices in crowdsourced scientific and social-scientific data classification, transcription, and collection in multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary communities.
Knitting Leaflets project
Our ambition has always been to extend the EOSC citizen science demonstrators to beyond the subject specialist areas of the ESCAPE EOSC cell. Therefore, with the support of the EOSC Future project, we have assisted in the development of the Knitting Leaflets citizen science project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/elliereed185/knitting-leaflet-project). This project aims to discover more about how knitting and knitwear developed in Britain during the twentieth century, by carefully characterising information on the front covers of knitting pattern leaflets and magazines, to yield knowledge of how versions of femininity connected to fashion and consumption, and how they changed over time. Three workflows were developed requiring increasing levels of knowledge in this subject area. The project had its public launch on 27th September 2023, and proved exceedingly popular as it was completed within a week, with 1,327 volunteers making a total of 52,928 classifications of 9,624 subjects.
African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK)
African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK; https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/xsr/african-indigenous-knowledge-aik-m) is the second citizen science project we have helped to develop to extend the EOSC citizen science demonstrators beyond the ESCAPE remit, with the project also using the Zooniverse platform. This project is still under development, but aims to capture, document and share traditional African indigenous food system knowledge for promoting sustainable nutritious food production, processing and consumption in Africa. The project asks volunteers to classify the types of food and tools present in photographs from traditional farmers in Sierra Leone and is currently paused while data collection is underway.