2024/04/23 by Katherine Buse, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Computer Science · Arts and Humanities · #Digital Games and Media #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Comics and Graphic Narratives
paper · pdf · doi:10.7551/mitpress/14609.003.0016
openalex publication_date 2024/04/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/22
interdisciplinary chapter draws on perspectives from media theory, critical software studies, and the history of science to explore the cultural work of the citizen science tool Foldit and its community.Because it is both an active research platform for combinatorial ge ne tics and a public engagement vehicle for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) outreach, Foldit is a unique transmedia proj ect that the authors interpret as a boundary object in the public performance and perception of science.Their analy sis of how Foldit frames and invites user participation parallels Camillia Matuk's case study on speculative design as a teaching tool for inspiring positive connections to STEM for K-12 students (chapter 7).This modeling of a par tic u lar relationship to the culture of science, a structure of feeling based on expertise but also enthusiasm and participation, can also be read as a form of performance.The Foldit community performs a certain kind of citizen science work that parallels the hopefulness embedded in Matuk's pedagogy and the more explic itly theatrical transmedia proj ect of UTOPIAN HOTLINE, as described by Kayla Asbell et al. in chapter 6.Ultimately, Buse and Dhaliwal relate how communities are informed by who shows up, who is counted as pre sent, and who gets to tell the stories of what the community does.Both UTOPIAN HOTLINE and Foldit invite par tic u lar forms of collective storytelling and community-building, each with its own transmedia constraints.This close reading of Foldit goes on to address a deeper set of questions about the epistemological stakes of community authorship and communally generated knowledge.As Terra Gasque and Ioana Mischie argue in their contributions to the volume (chapters 15 and 16, respectively), the politics and material contexts of these imagined communities can have power ful impacts on knowledge production: Buse and Dhaliwal describe exchanges in which Foldit enthusiasts requested that they be included as coauthors on scientific papers published based on the platform's ge ne tic discoveries.This chapter reminds us of the foundational questions about authenticity and identity at the heart of all storytelling-points articulated by Maureen McHugh Yeager, Dilman Dila, and Yomi Ayeni in their reflections on the practice of transmedia and the strategies and tactics required to cultivate communities with shared narratives (chapters 1, 4, and 5, respectively). 11