Comparison of co-created and collaborative approaches to citizen science adopted by the citizen linguistics project ‘On everyone’s mind and lips – German in Austria’

Co-creation aims at integrating citizens in all steps and decisions throughout the research process, whereas the collaborative approach focuses on contributions by citizens to a research project defined by scholars. The citizen linguistics project “On everyone’s mind and lips – German in Austria” applied both the co-created and collaborative approaches in the citizen humanities. A method to compare the collaborative linguistic treasure hunts and the co-created Question of the Month was proposed. The comparative analysis of the two approaches to citizen science showed that the strand that aimed a co-creation attracted more participants in the initial project phase. This may be due to the fact that the topic of language is emotionally loaded. However, participation significantly decreased in the other project phases, whereas the collaborative strand had a higher number of contributions per participant. The contribution to the advancement of scholarship were data preparation in the collaborative strand and identified research gaps in the co-created one.