CosmoQuest has a large presence at this year’s AGU in Washington, DC, from Dec 10-14, 2018. We have a number of posters and presentations by our team members. If you’re there, come by and check out what we’ve been doing!

Ben Azubuike will be presenting the poster IN23A-0765: Citizen Science – Unearthing Hidden Interests

When: Tuesday, 11 December 2018 13:40 – 18:00
Where: Walter E Washington Convention Center – Hall A-C (Poster Hall)

Description: One of the most important factors in assessing human subject data is acknowledging that people underestimate, exaggerate or omit information in their answers, and sometimes they just outright lie. Human beings may not acknowledge interests that they find embarrassing, or behaviors for which they fear being judged. Biases are also introduced by survey respondents trying to provide the answer they believe the surveyor wants to receive, rather than a true answer. In creating public programs that speak to the needs and interests of an audience, this can make it challenging to know what the audience actually wants. What is needed is a way to measure participant interests based on publicly available behaviors rather than from submitted surveys. In this presentation, we discuss the possibility of mining an audience’s Twitter engagements in order to probe their interests. Specifically, we examine the most followed topics as well as the most followed individuals within those topics. In order to understand the audience of CosmoQuest.org within the context of professional and amateur astronomy, we compare its Twitter audience’s interests and characteristics with those of other popular astronomy personalities and programs. In addition to giving us insight into our audiences, this also provides a way to determine who the most popular Twitter users are within different contexts.