Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange - Top Citizen Science Project 2018

DATA collected within the project 'Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange - Citizen Science Experiment'.

The project ran from April 2018 to March 2019 and was financed through the Top Citizen Science Initiative of the Austrian Science Fund, Grant Number TCS 028.

The following data of the project is provided: 

1. Audiofiles of face-to-face conversations including Citizen Scientists and Border Scholars

2. Transcripts of face-to-face conversations including Citizen Scientists and Border Scholars (provided by Mark Trafford)

3. Source Code and Output (CSV-file) of the Digital Café

4. Data from the archived project website (https://web.archive.org/web/20181121090817/https://www.univie.ac.at/talkingborders/)

5. Background Information about the project and additional documents (such as template of consent forms, template of post-project survey etc.)

Background description of the project:
On July 10-14, 2018, the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) held its Second World Conference in Vienna and Budapest. 448 participants from 49 countries attended the meeting, including renowned experts and practitioners, spanning all fields of the humanities and the social sciences. The ABS is the world’s largest academic organization dedicated to the systematic study and exchange of ideas, information and analysis of international borders, and the processes and communities engendered by such borders. The Second ABS World Conference had as its central topic Border-Making and its Consequences: Interpreting Evidence from the ‘post-Colonial’ and ‘post-Imperial’ 20th Century, and was co-organised by the University of Vienna and the Central European University on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Double Monarchy. The world academic conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies was turned into a site of scientific investigation itself, where citizen scientists met border scholars as equals for a cross-disciplinary (border/citizen science) experiment.

This Citizen Science project asked:

1. What do borders mean to border scholars?
2. What do borders mean to young adults from the (ex-) Habsburg area?
3. What new knowledge does a global encounter between citizen scientists and border scholars reveal?

The experiment consisted of two aspects:

a. It gathered 39 face-to-face dialogues about the meaning of borders.
b. It hosted a global digital café for 100 working days, where extracts from the dialogues were posted so that people could comment on them. The online page demonstrated how scientific knowledge on the global meaning(s) of borders is generated. The project aimed to offer a solid empirical data basis for future research in border studies.

Information on the set-up and execution of the experiment:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181121090817/https://www.univie.ac.at/talkingborders/ (persistent link to the archival copy of the site in the Wayback Machine)