More-than-Human Participation – call for papers (and participation)

This is a session that forms part of the day long event I’m organising at the Dana Centre during the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2013 in London. My colleague in the UCL Extreme Citizen Science research group, Christian Nold is organising this particular strand. If you’re interested in submitting an abstract, please contact him before Saturday 23rd February 2013.

More-than-Human Participation

Currently, in the fields of Citizen Science, Participatory Sensing and the Internet of Things, people are being encouraged to use technical systems to record and measure the external environment. Innovatively, this session adopts a ‘more-than-human’ framework (Latour 2004, Bennett 2010), to draw attention to the agency and activities of non-human actors such as living animals and plants, technical devices, concepts and places. This session aims to explore the often surprising consequences of research where technologies gain their own agency, and the environment starts to speak back: what happens when researchers try to turn citizens into sensors (Goodchild 2007) and sensor assemblages start to becoming citizens? This session asks for papers that examine  Citizen Science, Participatory Sensing or the Internet of Things, with a focus on the activities of more-than-human actors and addresses these questions: – What kinds of new knowledge emerge when we pay attention to the participation of more-than-human actors? – What kinds of power relationships emerge when institutional actors have to deal with more-than-humans? – How can we co-design for the participation of more-than-human collaborators?

Please send all abstracts (max. 300 words including title, name, contact details, abstract) and/or questions to Christian Nold (christian@softhook.com). Please submit abstracts by Saturday 23rd  February so that I have time to get the session organised.

OPAL: Open Air Laboratories, Tree Health and Enthusiasm

Could you identify these trees? My neighbour reckons the one in the middle is ash. The OPAL tree health survey will help people identify local trees as well as spot some of the pests and diseases affecting our trees.

The focus of my current research is enthusiasm, citizen science and tree health. Little did I know that 2 weeks after starting my new job I’d be attending a meeting about a citizen science tree health survey being developed by OPAL (Open Air Laboratories) in collaboration with Forest Research and The Food and Environment Research Agency.  For the past four months, I’ve attended working group and advisory group events as the teams work together to develop and launch the survey in May 2013. I imagine most of you will have heard of OPAL but if not, here is a short introduction. OPAL, which stands for Open Air Laboratories, started in 2007 and is funded by the Big Lottery with the aim of

developing a wide range of local and national programmes to encourage people from all backgrounds to get back in touch with nature. The project also generates valuable scientific data concerning the state of our environment.

By bringing scientists, amateur-experts, local interest groups and the public closer together, lasting relationships are being formed and environmental issues of local and global relevance are being explored. (from the OPAL website)

Since 2007, OPAL have developed 6 surveys in collaboration with their 15 partner organisations on themes as varied as:

• Soil and earthworm
• Air survey
• Water survey
• Biodiversity survey
• Climate survey
• Bugs Count

An evaluation and results of these surveys can be found in the recently launched Community Environment Report by OPAL.

The 7th survey focuses on tree health and is being developed in the same way as the previous surveys with Forest Research and The Food and Environment Research Agency helping to frame the ‘science questions’.

Since the first meeting I attended in early October, tree health has become headline news with the Chalara Ash Dieback outbreak. In turn, the significance of the survey has been recognised at the highest levels with OPAL being mentioned DEFRA’s Interim Chalara Control Plan (6 December 2012), specifically objective 3:

Objective 3 – encouraging citizen, landowner and industry engagement in surveillance, monitoring and action in tackling the problem

• Fund a pilot study to accelerate the development of the ObservaTREE, a tree health early warning system using volunteer groups

• Develop a plant health network of trained people to support official surveillance and detection

• Support work by industry groups to develop a charter mark for plants of UK origin

• Continue to work with the OPAL consortium to develop the OPAL survey on tree health for launch in May 2013

• Support a biosecurity themed show garden at next year‟s Chelsea Flower Show(from the report available here)

The reports contains further details:

OPAL (Open air Laboratories citizen science project) 2013 survey on tree health

Defra, Fera and Forest Research will continue to work with the OPAL consortium to develop the OPAL survey on tree health to be launched in May 2013. Included in the survey will be an activity to survey ash trees for pests and pathogens, including Chalara. Although the survey is currently planned for England only, work is underway with the Scottish and Welsh Governments to extend it to Great Britain.

This survey forms the basis for my first phase of fieldwork, mapping and understanding how tree health is governed in the UK, as well as how citizen science surveys are developed and tested. It’s been an exciting few months. Most recently, I have just returned from a few days in York talking to some of OPAL’s community scientists who will be involved in rolling out the training behind this survey, as well as officials and researchers at FERA tackling plant health issues and biosecurity. Looks like a week in the field with some plant health inspectors might be on the cards. Watch this space.

Research Groups, Interviewing and Writing Collaboratively

Curiosity is central to enthusiasm.

Yesterday was a marathon. I began with a chat over tea with my departmental head of research who gave me some very sage advice. It will take a bit of time to process but I can definitely see a renewed plan of action emerging – beginning with what do I have ready to submit to journals and what is my publishing plan going forwards.

I then headed over to  UCL ExCiteS for a lunchtime meeting about the ‘Participatory Science: understanding what motivates and sustains participation’ sessions at the RGS-IBG 2013. We now have a third session emerging on the role of technologies and things in participation – not to mention the immaterial, namely the unexpected. Exciting stuff.

This was followed swiftly by the ExCiteS research group meeting – this was fascinating – I was given the opportunity to chair the session, we were discussing the format of future sessions. How do group members with wide-ranging disciplinary and intellectual perspectives and approaches coalesce in a group meeting and leave feeling enthused about their research and collective endeavour. I’ve written about my participation in another research group before, but it is a very interesting question – in what ways do researchers in departments come together to share their work – via questions at the end of a department seminar? Reading groups? Shared email reading lists? Research group meetings? Or even a blog? We’re still in a process of determining the format but the general consensus was to create:

a supportive environment for ExCiteS group members to share their intellectual and practical experiences of research in an informal environment that fosters participation by all.

Sign outside Wellcome Collection on my way back to UCL

I then dashed over to the Wellcome Collection to meet a research participant (and for tea and cake). We talked about architectural enthusiasm, specifically this participant’s enthusiasm for The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.

Thanks to this website: http://artofnoises.com/2011/06/16/interpretation-team-de-la-warr-pavilion/

Then it was back to the department to Skype a co-author in The Netherlands about a paper I am co-writing about our time on the Enfield Exchange project. This is writing for a museum practitioner audience. There will be a section on lessons learned, but there will also be perspectives from a cultural geographer, national museum staff  and local museum curator.

Extreme Citizen Science

@DrHG conducting some fieldwork as part of monthly Wetland Bird Survey

As part of my research position at UCL Geography, I am also a member of the Extreme Citizen Science research group (ExCiteS) at UCL. Mentored by Professor Muki Haklay, director of ExCiteS, I seek through my research to bring together human geography and the cultural/social aspects of GIS use – specifically citizen science, participatory mapping and volunteered geographic information. So far I’ve presented my research outline to the group, as well as attended a couple of their regular reading groups and a staff meeting. As 2013 goes on, the group will host its first ‘away days’ – enabling group members to present their research as well as think creatively about interdisciplinary responses to the central theme of ExCiteS:

bring[ing] together scholars from diverse fields to develop and contribute to the guiding theories and methodologies that will enable any community to start a Citizen Science project that will help them deal with issues that concern them. With an interdisciplinary research approach, it also aims to provide a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their background and level of literacy, to collect, analyse and act on information by using agreed upon scientific methods. (taken from ExCiteS website)

This is a brief introduction to my affiliation, but I look forward to posting more about the group as our collaboration continues and my understanding of our interdisciplinary language improves. For me personally, interdisciplinary groupings are an integral way of conducting research that responds to global challenges – the more opportunities we have to share our research in this way will only make this way of working more successful but also more ExCiteS-ing*…

* Causing great enthusiasm and eagerness.

Digital environments for researching history

My archives and data management needs a bit of work…

On Thursday afternoon (17th Jan) I met Andrew Flinn (@andyucl) for a coffee. He is a senior lecturer in UCL Department of  Information Studies and director of their MA Archives and Records Management. We were initally in touch via my previous post at the Science Museum on the AHRC/HLF ‘All Our Stories’ community research development awards. He is an investigator on UCL’s ‘Dig Where We Stand’ project. We talked about our mutual interests in understanding history from below – here I’m particularly influenced by the public history movement and Raphael Samuel. Andrew’s interests relate specifically digital environments and participatory approaches to understand why people research their own history. He is supervising two CDAs in this subject area, with the Wellcome Collection and National Archives respectively. As I’ve posted before – collaborative doctoral awards are a means to access a range of institutions usually off-limits to behind-the-scenes research – I look forward to hearing a bit more about these projects as they evolve. We talked about the possibilities of community-generated history sites – how successful they are and what makes citizen science different from local history projects – which actually got us thinking about an event to bring researchers in this area together. It was a great chat and I’ve invited Andrew and his students to put something together for our ‘participatory science‘ conference sessions. I hope they do!

Poppy

This post is just to introduce Poppy (jack russell datschund cross), we (ie me at the culture of enthusiasm) loved walking with you at Christmas and look forward to seeing you again soon. It was a pleasure. #enthusiasm #dogs

Collaborative Geographies: doctoral studentships and research collaboration

Morris dancers – working as a team – superb.

The Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) – of which I have recently been appointed ‘dissertation prize coordinator’ - have commissioned a monograph on ‘Collaborative Geographies’. I am a co-editor alongside Dr Ruth Craggs and Dr Innes Keighren. We have invited papers from doctoral candidates, supervisors and non-academic partner organisations in order to showcase and explore the highs, lows, benefits and opportunities arising from the collaborative doctoral award. Watch this space for further information.