Smartphone citizen science: can a conservation hypothesis be tested using non specialist technology?

The work presented here, describes a citizen science scoping study using accessible stand-alone smartphone technology. Paper discolouration in a single journal type, the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser published from the dates 1876–2004 was chosen as the focus of study, with a specific hypothesis to be tested; that the wartime journals were more discoloured by yellowing due to them being accessed more frequently. A series of measurements were carried out with a smartphone device using the camera to act as a colorimeter and converting the CIE L xy vector length into a yellowing parameter Y. A number of preliminary attempts were made to recreate conditions that corresponded to the measurements of Y using a conventional spectrophotometer, this was by standardising distance from object and through a number of lighting conditions. It was found that the most consistently comparable results (with an offset) could be obtained using an iPhone 6S with the light source from an additional iPhone with sample to aperture distance of 4 cm. Both studies showed that the large increase in Y occurred in journals printed around 1912 with a plateau of elevated Y value detected in journals until the 1950s after which the Y parameter decreased until 2004. This indicates the frequency access hypothesis to be false and this negative proof was able to be evidenced by the data collected by the iPhone. It would be suggested that great care needs to be taken if such an approach of stand-alone measurement were to be taken into citizen science; training and testing would need to be undertaken, because of the challenge of reproducibility and the risk of sampling irreplaceable objects. © The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Background Citizen science is a sub group of crowdsourcing, the outsourcing of a function by a company or institution to an undefined and generally large network of people. Although far from being a new phenomenon, it has come to the fore recently because the tools to hand for analysis, combined with digital interconnectedness means that more people can contribute to scholarly work [1]. Modern technology has allowed major advances to be made in cultural heritage research that allows greater accessibility through improvements in the non-invasive sampling of artefacts. The affordability of technology also has the potential to put technology for research in the hands of everyone as potential citizen scientists or researchers. The fact that over 80% of the population in Australia now owns some kind of smartphone means that community engagement projects that utilize smartphone and tablet technology are within reach to many disciplines with citizen based contributions to mainstream scientific investigations becoming increasingly important. Technology is helping to make projects more accessible to the public, providing greater effectiveness of communications between science practitioners and citizen scientists, and providing accessible data collection and management tools which improve the flow and quality of data. For example in the Atlas of Living Australia [2] “Citizen science is a very important source of data about biodiversity. Data and insights gained through the efforts of citizen scientists can be as valuable as those obtained by scientists working in academia, natural history collections, government agencies and business. Harnessing the enthusiasm, interest and efforts of the thousands of Open Access *Correspondence: [email protected] Faculty of Science, Charles Sturt University, Booroma Street, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia Page 2 of 11 Wess Herit Sci (2017) 5:35 people participating in citizen science will continue to enhance the range and depth of data available for analysis and research.” Many citizen science projects relate to biodiversity observation, with fewer projects relating to conservation/curation of historical objects or measuring change in historical objects. The projects related to art conservation and digital conservation tracking such as ARTigo [3], speak to the gamification of data capture and the attachment of meta data to digitally captured but not necessarily curated artwork [4]. A smaller subset within conservation of cultural heritage speak to crowdsourced measurement/inspection of the state of collections [5, 6]. Beyond the use of smartphones to capture images, the digital camera has functionality to act as a colorimeter, where the field of view is converted to several quantified colour outputs that can be utilised by anyone interested in citizen science. Duplication and reliability are often a common causes of concern in the engagement of the non expert, however the challenged posed here was to respond to a hypothesis put by the manager of the Wagga Wagga archive, and to see if this could be tested, using the stand-alone technological capability of a smartphone. The conception of the work described here arose from a conversation of the researcher with the archivist at the Wagga Wagga Riverina Regional Archive. On discussion of the yellowing of the archive copies of the local paper, the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, it was posited that the archived editions of the Daily Advertiser from 1914– 1918 and 1939–1945 were more discoloured in terms of yellowing than periods before or after. This was suggested to be due to the papers being accessed more times for these periods relating to retrieval of wartime narrative. The aim of the work was to use the functionality readily available and free to iPhone users to test the hypothesis posed by the archivist and then cross validate the findings with a calibrated colour measuring probe that is less readily accessible but provides a gold standardisation to test the efficacy of the smartphone. By using the simplest methods of testing and the conversion of the data from a free colorimeter app to a yellowing index devised for the experiment, the aim was to lower the barriers and expertise needed to make a stand alone meaningful determination, whilst also demonstrating if such activities could be adopted with future work, and protocols developed in order to emulate citizen based studies in other archives and collections. Cellulose is our most abundant biopolymer produced by plants and bacteria. It has been utilised by humans for food, refuge, fuel, clothing and as a writing medium [7]. The method of artisanal paper production remains relatively unchanged whilst innovation in mass production has allowed paper to be the main storage medium for information until more recent challenges of the digital era. At the time of production little attention was paid to the longevity of paper; where the issues of paper deterioration in terms of fragility, hornification and yellowing now are significant [8]. The focus of the work here is on the yellowing of paper which the literature reveals to have a number of causes that are extrinsic and intrinsic [9–12], The yellowing of paper is seen as a challenge to conservation, where yellowing is synonymous with ageing and often more brittle paper which is especially problematic for archival access, and therefore also is an indicator of deterioration of paper integrity although there is a lack of correlation of discoloration with brittleness. A literature search revealed a paucity in systematic longitudinal studies of paper yellowing within a single archive or groups of archives, elements of the Identical books project IBP [13] are probably the best known example. The opportunity to conduct a study for a single journal type that has been in continuous print for nearly a century and a half could allow the measurement and progression of yellowing in situ to be measured and the notion of further discoloration due to access of wartime newspapers tested. It was pointed out at the time of discussion—by the author—that change in yellowing of journals printed at wartime, if true, may be due to changes in paper production and sourcing at that time.