New to Zooniverse?
Zooniverse is a tool for people-powered research: a place where members of the general public can contribute their time to assist digital projects in creating high-quality information. Zooniverse projects are incredibly varied: everything from classifying galaxies to deciphering old manuscripts. Zooniverse tasks tend to be short and easy, so you can make an impact by giving just a few minutes of your time. But the tasks can also be incredibly rewarding if you have an hour or an afternoon to spend. It’s an opportunity to learn a lot about the strange and wonderful things people study, and also to learn about data-related practices like classification, transcription, metadata creation, and more.
Zooniverse is very easy to use! You do not need an account to access Zooniverse, but if you are going to use it regularly you may want to register for an account, which will enable you to track your work or save documents to view again later. Register in the top right corner:
Each Zooniverse project is a bit different, and each project includes detailed instructions on how to contribute. Some common tasks on Zooniverse include transcription of historic documents, tagging documents or images, and interpreting sounds and images.
Steps for Using Zooniverse
- From the homepage, select ‘Explore projects’ to browse all of the available projects.
- You can filter projects by discipline by selecting a discipline from the list
- You can also filter projects by Most Active, Most Popular, Recently Launched, Most Recently Updated, and Most Help Needed
- When you select a project, select ‘Learn More’ to get a better sense of the goals of the project.
- The project will either have a ‘Get Started’ button or a ‘Get Started’ heading that includes buttons on specific tasks.
- Once you get started, you will be prompted with detailed instructions on how to contribute to the project. Please read these instructions closely and know you can also refer back to the instructions by clicking ‘Tutorial’ on the right hand side.
- The instructions for contributing vary widely across the projects, but all projects will include a tutorial that can be referenced whenever necessary.
- Start contributing!
