Finding the Common Culture: Uniting Science and the Humanities in Citizen Science

By Brad Mehlenbacher (North Carolina State University) and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher (University of Waterloo) Through citizen science projects, the Bodleian Library is improving access to their music collections, the Smithsonian is transcribing important documents, and researchers at the University of Oxford are transcribing Ancient Greek text from Greco-Roman Egypt. Although these projects represent promising examples of the humanities and social sciences, citizen science projects in these fields still aren’t all that common. Humanities and social sciences (HSS) include disciplines such as language studies, classics, comparative literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, economics, education, political science, and so on. These disciplines vary considerably in their intellectual traditions, methods, and disciplinary norms, but there are also common issues, questions, and challenges each discipline shares with the others. In fact, HSS and STEM disciplines also share common issues, questions, and challenges. Many of these issues, questions, and challenges are related to the development of ...