Old weather: citizen scientists in the 19th and 21st centuries

In 2010 the Royal Society journal Biology Letters publ ished an article, ‘Blackawton bees’, which caused something of a sensation: the findings , on bees’ foraging patterns, were original , but the true original i ty lay in the fact the experiments were in part devised, and the paper written, by a group of 8to 10-year-old chi ldren at Blackawton Primary School in Devon (Blackawton et a l ., 2011).[1] The article attracted cons iderable media attention, troubl ing, as i t did, the boundaries of profess ional science, and distinctions between scienti fic practice and education, not to mention the hierarchies of age and experience. It has not, so far, created a surge of scienti fic papers written by schoolchi ldren, but i t remains a s igni ficant and compel l ing example of what might be poss ible i f we adopt a more inclus ive vis ion of science. The Blackawton bees project has strong resonances for our own AHRC Science in Culture project, ‘Constructing scienti fic communities : ci tizen science in the 19th and 21st centuries ’, which is based at the Univers i ties of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the London Natural History Museum, the Royal Col lege of Surgeons and the Royal Society (www.conscicom.org).[2] The project explores , and contributes to, the growing movement of what has come to be known as ‘ci tizen science’, principal ly through the onl ine Zooniverse platform (www.zooniverse.org), founded by co-investigator Chris Lintott, but a lso through historical research into the networks and communities who contributed to science in the 19th century, during a period when profess ional structures were only just emerging.