Linda Andersson Burnett

Citizen science ranges from monitoring changes in bird populations to providing data on the pollution of shorelines with plastic waste. Although the term ‘citizen science’ is recent, the active participation of amateurs in the making of scientific knowledge has a long and important history. I research how science developed through collaborations between universities, museums and the lay public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am particularly interested in an influential Swedish-British tradition of scientific instructions. These were designed to simultaneously encourage and control citizen science by instructing lay people how to collect and record the natural world. I address questions such as: Why and how were instructions created and circulated? Why did people from different social strata engage with instructions? How did museums and amateur collectors interact, and how did the status of citizen science develop during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?