1/2 idea No. 13: Citizen science history

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

A simple one this: I’d like to read a history of citizen science, the involvement of members of the public in science.

Even just looking at Britain, a history might include topics such as the activities of the British Astronomical Association (active since 1890) or the Botanical Society of the British Isles (origins in the 1830s), civilian satellite tracking (similar to the ‘Moonwatch’ programme Doug Millard discusses in Cold War America in his Satellite book), the activities of the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (started in 1959), the or the land-use surveys conducted by organised teams of children in the 1930s (and repeated in the 1970s).

That barely scratches the surface.

Nearly every branch of professional science has some parallel activity among the public. The list of interesting organisations alone would run to many pages. It would be a rich story of skills, socialising, knowledge, nature, invention, travel, class, and home workshops, laboratories and observatories.

Does such a historical study exist?

Sally Shuttleworth led a major AHRC-funded project, Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries, from 2014 to 2019, which produced good work, and showed that historical studies could complement, inform and support contemporary citizen science, such as Zooniverse. But, by design, there was a gap where the twentieth-century history should be.

For natural history there is David Elliston Allen’s The Naturalist in Britain (1976). The bigger amateur bodies, such as the BAA, have their histories. But there is, I think, nothing that covers the full range or depth of the history of citizen science, either in terms of branches of science or time.