The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse

Oxford astrophysics professor Lintott (The Cosmic Tourist) recounts helping to start a new wave of citizen science with the Galaxy Zoo crowdsourcing platform in this spirited scientific memoir. “With more data, you need more scientists,” he explains, adding, “And that, dear reader, is where you come in.” Overwhelmed with the amount of data returned by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Lintott and colleagues formed a plan in 2007: build a simple website and “give talks to local astronomical societies, including increasingly desperate pleas to help with galaxy classification.” It worked—so well that other scientists gave over their data sets about moon craters, Antarctic penguins, and gazelles for counting and classifying. With deep dives into each project, Galaxy Zoo’s designers received ad hoc science lessons on the subject under investigation, from the “cosmic web of clusters and of filaments which wind their way around enormous empty voids,” to Hubble’s law. Ultimately, Lintott’s team “found that for almost any realistic case, combining human and machine classifications outperformed any result provided by each alone,” proving crowdsourcing’s applicability to disparate fields. Thorough, casually written, and full of anecdotes, Lintott’s episodic narrative digresses and ventures off track at times but remains engaging. His enthusiastic account should persuade anyone who reads it of the value of citizen science. (Dec.)