James Wynn - Citizen science in the digital age : rhetoric, science, and public engagement

The adage it takes a village to raise a child I think can be reasonably applied to books. It was only with the generous help of institutional funding, interviewees, and colleagues that this project has come to be in its current form. In developing this project, for example, visuals emerged as an important locus for exploring the impact of digital technologies and citizen science on communication and argument. In chapter 2, I make the case that the Internet and Internet connectable devices have allowed for the emergence of new kinds of risk representations. To arrive at this conclusion, I rely on evidence from visuals. Although their existence in the book seems like an unremarkable fact of scholarship, I almost did not include them because of the high cost of making the visuals suitable for reproduction. Their presence in this book is made possible through a generous grant from Carnegie Mellons Dietrich College Berkman Faculty Development Fund.

In addition to material support, the scholarship in this book would not have been possible without the cooperation of individuals and institutions that were willing to share their insights and creative productions with me. I would start by thanking the developers of RDTN and Safecast whose work I write about in chapters 2 and 3. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of these organizations in Japan and on the West Coast who got up early or stayed up late to be interviewed about their work. They include Akiba, Sean Bonner, Peter Franken, Marcelino Alvarez, and Azby Brown. These interviewees provided behind-the-scenes details about the founding and development of RDTN and Safecast, access to their Google Groups discussion board, and permission to use visuals of the Safecast map in this book. Next, I would like to express my appreciation to Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke Sr. whose Surface Stations project is the subject of chapter 4. Both gentlemen offered important historical background on the project and insight into the goals and challenges of its development. I am also thankful to Muki Haklay and Louise Francis of the University College of London who supplied me with details about their citizen-science sound-mappingproject described in chapter 5. They shared with me a transcript and audio file of the community meeting in which citizen scientists and borough representatives discussed the results of their sound-mapping project. The details of community interactions made accessible by these sources provide crucial support for the arguments in chapter 5. Finally, I would like to add a special thanks to Annie Griffin whose citizen-science sound-mapping project did not make it into this book but who generously agreed to be interviewed at a time when I thought it would.

Last, but not least, I want to thank all of those people who have given their intellectual and emotional support to help me develop this book. Among the former, I would like to recognize my graduate research assistant Christy Gelling whose incredible research skills were responsible for identifying many of the texts used as evidence in chapter 4. I also owe her a debt of gratitude for suggesting that the Surface Stations project might be worth exploring. Without her keen sense of scholarly potential, this chapter might have been on something entirely different. I would also like to express my debt to my rhetoric of science colleagues Lynda Walsh and Lisa Kernen who generously agreed to read parts of this book and give feedback. Their insights helped me strengthen my argument and make it more accessible. The clarity and strength of the books arguments are also thanks to all of my colleagues in the field who have attended the talks I have given on chapters in the book and offered insights and critiques. Finally, I would like to thank my wife and my kids for their emotional support and patience as I worked on this project. Without this village, this book would not have been possible.