The epistemic culture in an online citizen science project Programs, antiprograms and epistemic subjects

• Published in: Social studies of science Vol. 48; no. 4; pp. 564 - 588
• Main Authors: Kasperowski, Dick, Hillman, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England Sage Publications, Ltd 01.08.2018; SAGE Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Anti-program; citizen science; Citizens; Classification; Cognition; Cultural Studies; Cultural values; Culture; Educational Sciences; epistemic culture; epistemic subject; Epistemology; Filosofi; Galaxies; Galaxy Zoo; Image classification; Internet; Kulturstudier; Masses; Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified; Philosophy; program; Science; Utbildningsvetenskap; Volunteers; Övrig annan samhällsvetenskap; epistemic culture; anti-program; citizen science; program; epistemic subject; Galaxy Zoo
• ISSN: 0306-3127; 1460-3659; 1460-3659
• DOI: 10.1177/0306312718778806

In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the ‘essential tensions’ that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these largescale citizen science projects.