Technology probes: inspiring design for and with families
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Communications of the ACM
Exploring automatic music annotation with "acoustically-objective" tags
Proceedings of the international conference on Multimedia information retrieval
eBirding: technology adoption and the transformation of leisure into science
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
Citizen science system assemblages: understanding the technologies that support crowdsourced science
Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
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This paper investigates engaging experienced birders, as volunteer citizen scientists, to analyze large recorded audio datasets gathered through environmental acoustic monitoring. Although audio data is straightforward to gather, automated analysis remains a challenging task; the existing expertise, local knowledge and motivation of the birder community can complement computational approaches and provide distinct benefits. We explored both the culture and practice of birders, and paradigms for interacting with recorded audio data. A variety of candidate design elements were tested with birders. This study contributes an understanding of how virtual interactions and practices can be developed to complement existing practices of experienced birders in the physical world. In so doing this study contributes a new approach to engagement in e-science. Whereas most citizen science projects task lay participants with discrete real world or artificial activities, sometimes using extrinsic motivators, this approach builds on existing intrinsically satisfying practices.