Understanding Discussions of Citizen Science Around Sustainable Development Goals in Twitter

Abstract

Citizen science (CS) involves volunteers who participate in scientific research by collecting data or by addressing the needs of the project they are involved in. In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in how CS can contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that aim to reach a sustainable future. Research about data quality has taught us that through using an appropriate methodology, CS can foster scientific knowledge and promote specific actions to achieve accomplish goals. However, there is not much information about the SDGs that CS is more interested in. This paper presents a long-term study on how CS discuss about SDGs in Twitter, aiming to classify the discussion around the SDGs. The paper reports on a variety of topics such as open science, innovation and biodiversity, among others, but the results show that the most addressed topic in CS discussions in Twitter is about climate change, with corresponds to the SDG 13. Based on these findings, it is possible to affirm that climate change is a hot topic in CS in Twitter. However, there are also other SDGs that although underrepresented, are also discussed in CS.

Korrika, nortasun kolektiboaren eraikuntzarako: #korrika22-ren aztarna digitalaren azterketa

“…Internetek eskura jarri dituen bitarteko digitalen artean, Twitterrek modu erraz eta eraginkor bat eskaini die erabiltzaileei elkarren artean elkar-eragiteko eta saretzeko, hala nola, informazioa partekatzeko (Roldán-Álvarez et al, 2021). Hala, ikerketa burutzeko Twitter sare sozial digitala erabiltzeko erabakia hartzearen oinarrian dago ikerketa soziala egiteko tresna pribilegiatua dela ( Van-Dijk, 2016).…”

Comunicar los ODS para crear conciencia ciudadana: un análisis de la actividad de la Administración Pública en Twitter

“…Para que el compromiso y la concienciación se desarrollen en los términos descritos, ha irrumpido con fuerza la idea de que la comunicación es "uno de los principios básicos y necesarios para el cumplimiento de la Agenda 2030" (Gobierno de España, 2018: 154). Así, se puede asegurar que "la visión de la Agenda 2030 no se puede lograr a menos que los ecosistemas de comunicación e información permitan a las personas participar en la toma de decisiones relacionadas con el desarrollo sostenible" (Vargas y Lee, 2018: 69), a la par que se involucra en el proceso a las organizaciones sociales y empresariales (Herranz y García, 2021; Salvatore, Biffignandi y Bianchi, 2022) e, incluso, a las entidades que conforman la "Ciencia Ciudadana" (Roldán-Álvarez et al, 2021).…”

Developing a framework for investigating citizen science through a combination of web analytics and social science methods—The CS Track perspective

“…The analysis was based on the BERT approach (Devlin et al, 2018) using the multilingual uncased pretrained model, to cope with the presence of multiple languages in our dataset. The data from within the CS community were extracted from a collection that had been created by Roldán-Álvarez et al (2021), originally to detect connections that characterize the relation of CS activities to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From this dataset, we extracted tweets about climate change by custom filtering using terms such as "sdg13, " "climate action, " "climate change, " or "climate justice."…”

“…The data from within the CS community were extracted from a collection that had been created by Roldán-Álvarez et al ( 2021 ), originally to detect connections that characterize the relation of CS activities to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From this dataset, we extracted tweets about climate change by custom filtering using terms such as “sdg13,” “climate action,” “climate change,” or “climate justice.” This resulted in a dataset of 26,000 original tweets and 95,000 retweets.…”