Citizen Science at Middlebury
Citizen science projects are vehicles for democratizing science, giving ordinary people opportunities to advance scientific knowledge by collecting data, reporting observations, and conducting experiments. In this course students are invited to become citizen scientists by engaging in data collection and analysis around Middlebury. Through reading scientific papers and collecting observational data, we will discover how data quality issues and bias can arise during data collection, thereby impacting the kinds of analyses that can be conducted. We will discuss the origins of citizen science as a concept and explore tensions between “citizen” and “academic” science. Students will complete a semester-long project that contributes to an ongoing citizen science effort at Middlebury. 3 hrs lect./disc.