In the Victorian period, just like today, scientists and members of the public worked together to further scientific discovery. Before computers and cameras they had to draw what they saw. Their drawings are locked away in the pages of Victorian periodicals, such as Science Gossip, Recreative Science and The Intellectual Observer.
 
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has digitized and catalogued millions of pages of printed text between the 1400's and today related to the investigation of the natural world. Illustrations are a large part of these printed pages, and researchers are calling on citizen scientists to help identify, classify and correlate them via Zooniverse’s Science Gossip project. The data that citizen scientists create by tagging illustrations and adding artist and engraver information will have a direct impact on the research of historians who are trying to figure out why, how often, and who made images depicting a whole range of natural sciences in the Victorian period.