Samantha Blickhan

This presentation will introduce attendees to the Zooniverse platform. Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most-known platform for online participatory research. Since 2009, almost 3 million volunteers around the world have contributed to more than 450 projects across disciplines from astronomy to history to zoology, each led by a different research team and reliant on public participation. In particular, this talk will use case studies to demonstrate the relationship between digital cultural heritage and participatory research, as well as what research teams do with their project results and data once their Zooniverse project is complete.

Attendees will leave with an increased understanding of what it means to run a participatory research project with digital cultural heritage materials.

Dr. Samantha Blickhan is Co-Director and Humanities Lead for the Zooniverse.org crowdsourcing platform. In her role, she guides the strategic vision for Zooniverse Humanities efforts, manages development of new tools and resources, consults with teams in building and running projects, and produces original research about crowdsourcing, digital humanities, sustainable development, ethics in public participatory projects, and user experience design.

Her work has been supported by funding from the IMLS, NEH, NSF, ACLS, and The Kavli Foundation. She was co-I of the Collective Wisdom project, which produced The Collective Wisdom Handbook, an authoritative book on the ‘state of the art’ in cultural heritage crowdsourcing, in 2021.