Report on activism and science within Citizen Science (COESO D.5.3)

The final deliverable of Work Package 5 (WP5) Cooperation Analytics within the COESO project is centred on Task 5.3, "Observation and analysis of conflicts of
justification between activism and research activities", employing a theoretical framework and computational methods designed to understand discourses within
citizen science practices of selected pilot projects, incorporating textual analysis. It introduces the theoretical framework of Boltanski and Thévenot [1991] (2006)
known as "On justification: economies of worth." This framework, encompassing seven conflicting "orders of worth," offers a lens to understand and analyse the
justification processes in social life disputes. Given the diversity of stakeholders in citizen science projects, conflicts between different perspectives and values are valuable for defining citizen science conventions for the sake of accountability. The methodology employed involves a combination of semi-automation methods and qualitative analysis for textual data, aligning it with the theoretical framework. Outputs include dictionaries of keywords signalling different orders of worth, the results from a feasibility study on two algorithms tested on collected data, and insights into the limitations and opportunities of automated and qualitative analyses. The lessons learnt emphasise the requirement for future research to detect and understand citizen science’s moments of conflicts for their accountability and facilitating reflexivity among stakeholders about their scientific practices.