Linguistics is a citizen science project developed to “ferret out specific aspects of linguistic meaning that scientist believe are key to understanding the human language. As a participant there are various different categories, or levels. When one first begins, there is only level that one is allowed to play at. When I first began the first level was entitled “Fickle Folk”. Once a person have evaluated enough dialogue at this level said person may then move forward to “Simon says Freeze”. I was also able to participate in “Equilibrium” “A Good World” and “Philosophical Zombie Hunters”
At each level, the participant is given a fun scenario in which they role play as a person of authority meant to determine if a persons actions is punishable by a law put into play in the scenario. My personal favorite scenario to work on was “Equilibrium.” In “Equilibrium” if a person applied force to another person they were going to blow up, if that person used another object to apply force to another person, both the person applying the force and the object would blow up. The person whom the force was applied to would remain unharmed. Robots went around this world recording what was happening; however the robots couldn’t interpret what was going on. The citizen science participant’s job was to read the situation and determine who, and what was going to be blown up. Not every sentence resulted in someone blowing up.
The main importance of all the sentences you are presented with is the verb. Each level has prizes and each participant is ranked on their contribution to the research. My ranking is currently 247 out of the 8357 people who have contributed to this project. When I first began the project, the scientists were already in phase three. However, they only had about 30% of phase three completed. Now the project has completed 93% of their phase three data set. I do consider myself a contribution to this project. The overall goal of this project is to discuss how the structure of language informs our understanding of thought, with the hope that the research will lead to how people learn and think.
The creators have both a blog and a forum to thank and update participants on the information of how they are helping the community and what the research is going towards. On the blog and forum one can see a lot of the work being done with the research. I truly enjoyed this part of the seminar because I had never previously heard of citizen science project. I think its great that as a non-science major I am still able to contribute to the scientific world. I think this is something that everyone should know because the more knowledgeable scientist become the better quality of life can be provided for society.
