Review by Choice Review
Why does design matter when developing citizen science mobile applications? The answer, in the concluding chapter of this insightful volume, is that in efforts ranging from digital government to innovative open science, well-designed user interfaces best enable contributions from the widest spectrum of participants. An introductory chapter by coeditor Haklay (University College London) clarifies the relation between volunteered geographic information and geographic citizen science and provides an overview of the latter's theoretical foundations. The subsequent chapters were produced from contributions to an interdisciplinary workshop on geographic citizen science held in 2018. Discussions include various examples of data collection using mobile devices in various implementations. The applications presented in "Global North" chapters range from climate change to urban planning; those discussed in the "Indigenous Communities" chapters focus on representation of traditional ecological knowledge in Canada, Central Africa, and Brazilian Amazonia. This section provides exceptional insight into the design challenges of representing, e.g., pictographs or nonstandard characters using standard XML data architecture in user interface design, citing the Sapelli cellphone app developed to overcome language and literacy barriers (https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/mapping-indigenous-territories-in-africa/). This open-access text is commended to interdisciplinary readers interested in the confluence of user interface design, mobile geographic information systems, cultural anthropology, international development, and digital government. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers. --Christopher A Badurek, SUNY Cortland
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
