All posts tagged with twitter

On 23 March 2020, the U.K. went into its first national lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing and teleworking became the norm, and the walls of our homes became, in many ways, the boundaries of our individual worlds.

Amateur mycologist Clare Blencowe was eager to find a positive distraction from the realities of life during a pandemic. The Biodiversity Heritage Library’s open access collections, which for Blencowe had become a welcome refuge from the continuous onslaught of negative news articles, now became the inspiration for a new, socially distanced way to connect with other fungi lovers—in the form of “The Mycological Book Club”, an online, Twitter-based book club with a particular focus on open access literature.

Twitter is a popular communication channel amongst the scientific community. Scientists use the platform to communicate with colleagues and share their research findings with both other scientists and the public.

Twitter may also be a valuable source of data for researchers. For example, ecologists from the University of Gloucestershire found that “Twitter-mined” data is useful for phenological studies, such as winged-ant emergence or the appearance of house spiders in the fall.

Twitter conversations can also spark unexpected discoveries. For example, a recent @BioDivLibrary Twitter conversation helped uncover a connection between the scientific literature and a museum’s collections.

So you’ve been crowdsourcing and now you’ve collected lots of fantastic data. What do you do with it? Or maybe you’ve been thinking about crowdsourcing but you’re not sure how you would integrate what you get with the data you already have. The truth is that crowdsourcing often yields lots of fuzzy data and fuzzy solutions for reintegration with existing content.