The Glossary of the Patois of Western Switzerland is a pioneering citizen science project in the field of linguistics and dialectology: born at the end of the 19th century, it has been continuously funded, and active, ever since. The Glossary is based on the collection and analysis of the local variants of the French-speaking patois, which were threatened by rapid extinction, through the written exchange of questionnaires, instructions, data and feedbacks with a network of dedicated “correspondents”.
In this article, we analyse this project with a modern reading grid by looking at how citizen participation in a research project was conceived and designed more than a hundred years ago. We examine three types of questions: the scientific objectives of the project and its historical context; the design and organisation of citizen collaboration in the project, in particular the nature of the tasks entrusted to citizens and the strategies for controlling the quality of the data; and finally, the various communication tools of the project, which allowed citizen participation during a long (10 years) data collection process, as well as the continuous engagement of the political funders (French-speaking Cantons and the Swiss Confederation) during 125 years so far.
