Specification of Web-based Analytics Methods and Tools D3.1

One of the central characteristics of the CS Track approach to investigating citizen science projects and activities is to focus on underlying types of participation, collaboration and knowledge creation. This perspective comprises semantic and pragmatic aspects of scientific discourse as well as more structural analyses that focus on connections and networking inside the projects, between different projects as well as the information flow between CS projects and other institutions in society (e.g. public media or education). Many relevant activities are materialised in online digital media such as web pages, forums or contributions to social media channels. WP3 aims at extracting and further processing such pieces of information from web and social media sources. For doing so, the consortium draws on experience with a variety of representations and processing techniques with emphasis on text mining and semantic modelling as well as (social) network analysis. This deliverable specifies the WP3 approach in terms of the selection and description or pertinent methods and their relevance in the citizen science context. In addition to the general rationale, this is illustrated by an example application of network analysis techniques to a Zooniverse case. The final section explains the intended usage of the methodology regarding the interplay with other work packages and information provided to the outside.