Introducing: the Community Catalog

The Community Catalog (https://community-catalog.zooniverse.org) is a custom tool to offer Zooniverse project participants the opportunity to explore a project dataset, and to allow our team to experiment with creating new pathways into classifying.

We wanted to create a digital space that would facilitate not only sharing, but also discovery of participants’ contributions alongside institutional information (i.e. metadata) about the subjects being classified. The result was a data exploration app connected to specific Zooniverse crowdsourcing projects (How Did We Get Here? and Stereovision) that allows users to search and explore each project’s photo dataset based on participant-generated hashtags as well as the institutional metadata provided by project teams. 

The app includes a home page (shown above) with search/browsing capabilities, as well as an individual page for each photograph included in the project. The subject page (shown below) displays any available institutional metadata, participant-generated hashtags, and Talk comments. A ‘Classify this subject’ button allows users exploring the data to go directly to the Zooniverse project and participate in whatever type of data collection is taking place (transcription, labeling, generating descriptive text, etc.).

Combined with the Talk (and QuickTalk) features, we’re hoping that this tool will encourage participants to share their experiences, memories, questions, and thoughts about the project photos, the historical events depicted, and the importance of the collection. The Community Catalog offers an approach where a participant can allow their interest in a specific item to lead them to take part in a classification task, rather than classification to Talk being a one-way street.

How Did We Get Here? was the pilot project for the Community Catalog, and is now complete. We have just launched the second project to use the Catalog, Stereovision, which you can participate in either via the Community Catalog site, or by visiting the Zooniverse project here: Stereovision.

The Community Catalog is not available for re-use by other projects in this exact form (i.e. as a standalone app), but we’re planning to incorporate some of its features into the Talk section of the Zooniverse platform in 2025. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts about this app, please feel free to reply to this post, or email us at contact@zooniverse.org.

The Community Catalog was developed as part of the AHRC-funded project Communities and Crowds. This project is run in collaboration with volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, United Kingdom, and National Museums Scotland, as well as with the Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.