Opening up historical atmospheric electricity data with Citizen Science

Many paper archives of environmental data have yet to be made available digitally. One example is an extensive series of atmospheric electricity observations made at UK sites during the majority of the twentieth century, which contains almost continuous measurements at hourly resolution. Renewed interest in atmospheric electricity due to its relationship to climate variables and local air pollution has made digitising this archive a priority. Due to the number of handwritten individual observations to be transcribed, a citizen science keying project has been implemented on the Zooniverse platform: see https://rdg.ac/electricity . Through press and news articles, over 500 citizen scientists have now been recruited to contribute to this task. We have also evaluated which of these profile-raising activities have been most effective for drawing volunteers to the project. One advantage of having multiple individuals take part is that ambiguous handwritten entries can be recovered effectively and accurately, through combining the judgements of different transcribers. A further key aspect of engagement has been putting our contributors in touch with how the original data looks, and to some extent “feels”, as it provides an entry point for digital era humans into how past environmental data was recorded, in pen and ink. Since citizen science project are undertaken entirely by volunteers, we also discuss the challenges with maintaining engagement with the community of volunteers, which is essential for the successful completion of data transcribing projects to yield the associated scientific advancement.