The structure of my argument

This argument is split across the following two Chapters as follows: in Chapter 4, I will consider the interests of the team involved in the setting-up and running of Galaxy Zoo, how they have pursued these interests to date through Galaxy Zoo, how these interests have changed over time as they have discovered (and pursued) previously-unanticipated opportunities afforded by the project, how this has impacted on the way the project has been developed, and the potential threats to these interests that these team members see looming on the horizon. In the subsequent Chapter, I will describe the features of the Galaxy Zoo ethos and attempt to show that, rather than being fixed and inevitable, they have emerged as a result of choices made from a range of alternatives which the core team believed would better enable themselves to pursue their emergent interests.

Of course, no group of social actors exist in a vacuum; instead, they are dependent on, collaborate with, and are in competition with, other actors. Thus, I need to contextualise Galaxy Zoo in order to show: 1) how the projects’ goals became oriented towards the goals of cosmology; 2) how these goals relate to the discipline in which cosmology is situated (astronomy); and 3) how the study of astronomy has achieved legitimacy in society- at-large. This will be covered in Section 4.2, where I provide a brief historical survey of astronomy, how cosmology’s aspirations for most of the 20th _{century has been to raise its status relative to other astronomical} subdisciplines, and how Galaxy Zoo has presented new opportunities to achieve this.

In response to these contexts, I then describe the development and work of the Galaxy Zoo project itself (subsections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2). I also present the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), an umbrella organization of CCPs (collectively known as the Zooniverse) set up by key members of the Galaxy Zoo core team, and argue that these individuals can be understood as being interested in the possibility of leading a growing Citizen Cyberscience movement through the CSA. In particular, because the core team had not originally anticipated the scale of Galaxy Zoo, this possibility was not apparent to them when they initially launched the project, and this is an example of how their interests have evolved. Further, I argue that these individuals regard the continued success of the Galaxy Zoo project itself as critical to the potential success of this movement, and the pursuit of this new interest therefore, in turn, strengthens their interest in securing the project’s future (subsection 4.3.3).

69 Drawing on my data from interviews with people involved in Galaxy Zoo and other sources of information, I discuss the challenges the core team sought to address when establishing Galaxy Zoo as a successful scientific project, and the challenges they expect to face in order to sustain this into the future. One such challenge is the core team’s dependence on enrolling other astronomers to use the project data in their own research in order to justify the project’s continued existence. By situating these astronomers in the broader context of cosmology, it can be seen how the core team have come to an understanding that their continued ability to enrol these astronomers relies almost exclusively on the generation of data of a scale and quality unmatched by other sources of data and not on the other factor that might be assumed to attract them to Galaxy Zoo, namely the public engagement aspect (subsection 4.4.1). Linked to this challenge is another, namely the project’s struggle to gain scientific credibility in the face of scepticism from the discipline-at-large, and the hard work and numerous tasks undertaken by core team members to this end (4.4.2).

Having thus discussed how Galaxy Zoo became established, the successes-to-date which have resulted from it, and also set out the future aspirations of those involved in the project, I then turn to contemporary developments in cosmology (Section 4.5). In particular, I describe methods that are currently being developed and implemented to create data sets of a scale and quality that far outstrip those which can be produced by Galaxy Zoo, and are seen by core team members as threatening to supersede Galaxy Zoo in terms of contributing to cosmology’s core disciplinary interests. In turn, they are worried that this will render their project obsolete, because they will not be able to continue enrolling astronomers to use the data generated by the project. Under such conditions, one might ask why the members of the core team are so concerned with continuing the project in the future – after all, many of them are cosmologists and thus might be assumed to want to move on and keep up with the rest of their field. I argue that this is because their interests have changed both over time and in the shifting network of relations in which they are embedded (see subsection 4.1.1), and should no longer be understood only in the context of astronomy, but also in terms of their aspirations with the CSA, and Galaxy Zoo’s perceived importance in establishing this.

Finally, I summarize the key points of this Chapter, in particular how the core team have perceived (and addressed) the challenges to the pursuit of their interests-to-date and to the pursuit of their interests in the near future, This provides a foundation for the next Chapter, where I present an account of the development of the Galaxy Zoo ethos.

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