Tales of Tiger Beetles and Other Citizen Sciences

For a practice that has been around in some form for over a century, citizen science has a seeming newness those familiar with its history might not expect. Speculation on why citizen science has gained significant traction in the last few decades—even gaining its familiar banner of “citizen science”—often points to the emergence of online tools for data collection and sharing, and there are websites such as SciStarter that work to coordinate projects and volunteers, and scientists are increasingly turning to the practice insofar as numerous conferences dedicated to citizen science have been held. Despite the threads that lead back a century, the situations to which citizen science projects and citizen scientists respond have notably distinct characteristics from their antecedent forms, and so the current swell of interest in the enterprise is not all together unexpected. Indeed, there is much to explore in how citizen science projects emerge, how they are developed, how they are conducted, and the influence or impacts they may have. Wide ranges of disciplines around the world have engaged in forms of citizen science and this multiplicity poses further challenges for understanding the character of citizen science.

In recent years, several popular nonfiction books, including The Incidental Steward, Citizen Science, Citizen Scientist, and Diary of a Citizen Scientist, have added to a growing body of literature that explores citizen science and citizen scientists.¹ Each of these books in particular offer insights into just what is meant by citizen science and attendant conversations to this enterprise’s development. Autobiographical accounts and internalist histories comprise many of these cases, and in each case the nature of citizen science as a meaning-making enterprise as well as a social arrangement is explored to reveal different attributes of this evolving research practice. In this review essay, we offer an overview of these four books as a sample of a growing area of scientific knowledge making, and we identify some key themes that may be of interest to those working in science studies.

The pillar of citizen science is the participation of citizens in the sciences—citizen understood in terms of their engagement with the public sphere rather than affiliation with a particular state entity. Mary Ellen Hannibal, author of Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction, summarizes the origins of the participatory nature of citizen science in her prologue, writing, “Some people like to call citizen science ‘participatory research.’ This comes out of a decades-long unfolding of thought in the humanities in which researchers began to grapple with the very unpleasant insight that . . . it is impossible to take a ‘me expert, you study subject’ view that is not condescending, incomplete, and more or less self-serving” (9).

Indeed, the sciences too have been grappling with these concerns, as conferences dedicated to citizen science and public participation in scientific research illustrate. The antidote to a simplistic expert-public divide is provided by citizen science, where one implicates “the word I into the narrative” (10). As Hannibal writes, “If the researcher is also a subject, and if the subject is also a driver of the research project, then maybe we can get some equity here, and ‘co-create’ knowledge” (10). In this way, citizen science is collaborative and involves those affected by research programs. That is, there is a dialogue that is occurring between the researcher and...