Talking in the Zooniverse: A collaborative tool for citizen scientists

Researchers in fields as diverse as astrophysics, ecology and papyrology face a commom problem: as the size and complexity of digital datasets increases dramatically, new strategies in computational thinking are needed to transform data into knowledge, Virtual Citizen Science (VCS) a form of collaborative research involving the general public as volunteers in online reporting or analysis of data. [1], has proven to be one successful approach to solving this Big Data problem. In particular, the Zooniverse.org platform for citizen science has provided a unique crowdsourcing solution for these challenges across, a wide range of disciplines by harnessing the visual processing capabilities. of over a million volunteers and asking them to make observations. on data sets of complex objects presented in online interfaces.