Building Partnerships to Train Climate and Weather Citizen Scientists: Investigating Public Participation in the Rescue of Historical Weather Data

Launched publicly in April 2018, The Data Rescue: Archives and Weather (DRAW, https://test.citsci.geog.mcgill.ca/) Project furthers scientific understandings of weather and climate and its impact on people. Through citizen science and crowdsourcing, DRAW involves the Montreal public in the collection and transcription of weather information recorded between 1871 to 1964 in logbooks from the former McGill University Observatory. DRAW, itself, constitutes an interdisciplinary effort with researchers from McGill University's Faculties of Arts, Science and Education partnering with the McGill University Archives. This study examines data from identical pre/post questionnaires and exit interviews conducted with two groups using DRAW in differing settings. Our first group took part in a three-week curriculum module taught as part of a class on social science research methods where students worked with DRAW and conducted archival research into the human events that coincided with historic weather and climate. It consisted of students aged 16- to 20-years-old from Dawson College, a two-year Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP) that is a publicly funded and mandatory part of education in the province of Quebec. We compared findings against a series of one-day workshops conducted at McGill University with adults and students aged 20- to 35-years-old. We posed three interrelated questions about how participants and researchers felt about this work, including: 1. Does such work truly constitute citizen science? 2. Does it provide scientists with accurate and usable data? and, 3. How do ordinary citizens learn and benefit from their participation? Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of research-based partnerships in promoting citizen science to enhance outreach, education, and engagement with weather and climate science. They also indicate what challenges can effect the implementation of projects such as ours.