# Citizen Science on Twitter: Using Data Analytics to Understand Conversations and Networks
###### Abstract  
This paper presents a long-term study on how the public engage with discussions around citizen science and crowdsourcing topics. With progress in sensor technologies and IoT,our cities and neighbourhoods are increasingly sensed, measured and observed. While such data are often used to inform citizen science projects, it is still difficult to understand how citizens and communities discuss citizen science activities and engage with citizen science projects. Understanding these engagements in greater depth will provide citizen scientists, project owners, practitioners and the generic public with insights around how social media can be used to share citizen science related topics, particularly to help increase visibility, influence change and in general and raise awareness on topics. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first large-scale study on understanding how such information is discussed on Twitter, particularly outside the scope of individual projects. The paper reports on the wide variety of topics (e.g., politics, news, ecological observations) being discussed on social media and a wide variety of network types and the varied roles played by users in sharing information in Twitter. Based on these findings, the paper highlights recommendations for stakeholders for engaging with citizen science topics. c 2020; 122000; 10.3390/612120210  
Social media, defined as a set of online tools designed to enable and promote social interactions [2] has revolutionised how we communicate with others and share our daily experiences and opinions, providing opportunities for citizens to present their views without being subject to the influence of economic and political pressure [3]. Social media has also been defined as as \"a group of Internet-based applications\" based on Web 2.0 that \"allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content\" [4]. Over the past several years, while multiple terms (\"social network sites\", \"social networking sites\", \"online social networks\", \"social networks\") and definitions [5] have been used interchangeably [6], our reference to social media aligns most with the definition offered by [7]. In essence, participants in social network sites have unique identifiable profiles, who consume, interact with and contribute to streams of user generated content and publicly articulate connections they create. Social media, ubiquitous computing and mobile technology have become essential parts of our daily lives and significantly contribute to how we sense our cultures and engage as citizens [8; 9]. While social media have been extensively used in a variety of fields for gathering real-time understanding of real-life phenomena in a variety of applications such as emergency response [10], event monitoring [11], social activism [12], crime [13], etc., there is little understanding of how social media contributes to citizen science--particularly within the context of Open data sources such as microblogging sites like Twitter. Many projects and initiatives already have their own online social environments where participants share and discuss ideas. However, such interactions are difficult to study and, often inaccessible to non-project participants. Twitter, on the other hand is an (open) social media platform that supports such a conversational nature of discussion, with easy to access means for collecting data. Users can interact with one another, thereby creating connections (by tagging other users, replying to posts or retweeting user posts) out of their interactions. These connections can form networks of interaction, based on conversations, thereby helping researchers better understand the purpose and behaviour of communications (e.g., broad-/live-casting, information seeking, promotions, etc.). The work reported here aimed to gather an understanding of the citizen science community and the subsequent networks that are formed as a result of interactions on Twitter about citizen science causes.