Planet hunters and seafloor explorers: Legitimate peripheral participation through practice proxies in online citizen science

Gabriel Mugar, Carsten Østerlund, Katie Devries Hassman, Kevin Crowston, Corey Brian Jackson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

54 Scopus citations

Abstract

Making visible the process of user participation in online crowdsourced initiatives has been shown to help new users understand the norms of participation [2]. However, in many settings, participants lack full access to others' work. Merging the theory of legitimate peripheral participation [18] with Erickson and Kellogg's theory of social translucence [10, 11, 16] we introduce the concept of practice proxies: traces of user participation in online environments that act as resources to orient newcomers towards the norms of practice. Through a combination of virtual [14] and trace ethnography [12] we explore how new users in two online citizen science projects engage with these traces of practice as a way of compensating for a lack of access to the process of the work itself. Our findings suggest that newcomers seek out practice proxies in the social features of the projects that highlight contextualized and specific characteristics of primary work practice.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2014 - Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages109-119
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9781450325400
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014 - Baltimore, MD, United States
Duration: Feb 15 2014Feb 19 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore, MD
Period2/15/142/19/14

Keywords

  • Citizen science
  • Legitimate peripheral participation
  • Situated learning
  • Social translucence
  • Socialization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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