Digital Participation for Data Literate Citizens – A Qualitative Analysis of the Design of Multi-Project Citizen Science Platforms

Abstract

In the digitized world, data literacy becomes a skillset that enables participation in transforming societies and job markets. This motivates the exploration of how creative teaching concepts might look like in order to form those relevant competencies. Citizen science, as a collaborative approach to scientific research, engages citizens in almost all forms in working with data that is meaningful to them. As such, this paper seeks to examine the potential of digital citizen science in enabling to practice and gain data literacy knowledge. To do so, this paper is focusing on the design of multi-project citizen science platforms through a structured artifact review. Furthermore, we gain insight through a qualitative interview study from 14 interviews (citizens, researchers, and technical experts), drawing conclusions on current platform designs as well as potentials and challenges for their further development. Our results show, on the one hand, that platforms provide a variety of ways to interact with different kinds of data while offering a simple and user-friendly design. On the other hand, functions for communication and support could be further developed and learning opportunities for citizens comprise several, but not all aspects of data literacy.