Galaxy Zoo Podcast

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In my profession, journalists are trying to figure out what comes next for journalism. Stories created by members of the public are called citizen journalism or participatory journalism. Some journalists say we need more direct work from the public. The world of science also is figuring out both how to tell the story of science to the public, and how to involve the members o f the public in discovery. Web projects allow that. At Galaxy Zoo, people get to classify galaxies according to their shapes. To do this, viewers look at pictures of galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope. They decide if a galaxy is spiral or elliptical and classify the direction of its rotation. Apparently people are better at identifying the shapes than supercomputers are, so regular people add to the data.  At  Galaxy Zoo, everybody can be an astronomer. Everybody can be a  scientist.  This is Jennifer Follis for Science and the Media.