A gamified- and citizen science-based approach for the exploration of the historical German language in the Austrian context
Antonio G. Losada.jpg
Mr Antonio Gabriel Losada Gómez | University of Salamanca, Spain | 07.12. to 22.12.2017 | 16 Days
COST-STSM-CA15212-39069
Host: Eveline Wandl-Vogt | Hostinstitution: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
A gamified- and citizen science-based approach for the exploration of the historical German language in the Austrian context
Research Interest
The main topic of the research was the application of citizen science approaches to the digital humanities field, bringing the yet unknown knowledge and insights from both volunteers and experts to the project we’re working at and forming a community of people working together towards improving the communal outcomes of it.
Summary of research completed in STSM
To sum up everything achieved during my stance in Vienna and the duration of the STSM, a list of the most important milestones reached during the two weeks is presented next:
- Multiple potential working groups of citizen scientists and volunteers were discovered and defined. Those groups are supposed to help us achieve the best possible results in terms of solving research questions. To do this, they will be contacted and participate in meetings and workshops.
- Two approaches were defined as to how to deal with the. The first one would focus on organizing meetings in which we would give participants concrete research questions we want them to help us answer. In the second one the volunteers would be the ones leading the discussion and coming with their interests.
- An open and adaptive development process was described, in which can be considered one of the main achievements of the STSM. With it, we will be able to tackle any project no matter its scope, the background of the citizen scientists and groups of volunteers involved, or the actual expected outcome.
- Gamification and gaming-based methods will be applied to the prototypes created next and as the result of the work carried out during the STSM, which will fit the purpose of our team’s project in that they will help us find new insights and discover knowledge about diverse cultural topics.
- A template for result generation was also defined to the finer level of detail, consisting on multiple steps: defining a set of research questions to solve, specifying collaboration groups, organizing workshops, analysing workshop outcomes, developing prototypes and writing scientific papers, applying feedback to the prototypes to evolve them, reaching results and disseminating them.
- Although no workshops were held during the STMS due to the lack of participating groups to work with, a meeting with game-developer Jeremiah Diephius was organized and took place at Linz. We could get instant feedback from a person tightly related with the gamification approach we want to take next.
- Two concrete tools are expected to be built as the result of the STSM. One, related to the creation of an online gamified system that would allow us to get feedback and insights about the relation between cultural aspects and the topic of food. The other, related to the building of a recipe-based system in which users would be able to explore the topic of “food”.
