Yesterday I presented “Planet hunters and seafloor explorers: legitimate peripheral participation through practice proxies in online citizen science” a paper I wrote with my colleagues at Syracuse University as part of our ongoing research on newcomer learning in the Zooniverse suite of citizen science projects. The paper was presented at the Conference for Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. A copy can be found in the CSCW 2014 Proceedings. For a quick preview, check out the abstract below.

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.