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DCH Session 9 Crowdsourcing
Thursday Nov 28, 10:00–11:15 GMT = 11:00–12:15 CET
Convenors: John Pearce (King's College London), Mia Ridge (British Library)
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/X9eRZFrMxNI
In this session we will begin by introducing the concepts behind crowdsourcing, participation and engagement with the public in transcribing, describing or categorising cultural heritage collections, with several concrete examples taken from active projects, including some from the British Library's collections. We will then explore in more depth one case study, the Portable Antiquities Scheme, hosted at the British Museum, and some of the goals and challenges of this project. We will suggest a practical project which will encourage you to ask questions about crowdsourced data, assess editing interfaces, and consider the attraction for the public of active research participation.
- Bland, R. 2013 "Response: the Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme." Internet Archaeology 33. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.33.8 (this is in part a response to other papers in the same volume which again may be of interest if you wish to take this further. Especially the papers by Campbell, Wilson and Harrison)
- Mia Ridge (2013). "From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing." Curator 56.4, 435–450. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117/
- Bevan, A., Pett, D. et al. 2014. "Citizen Archaeologists. Online Collaborative Research about the Human Past." Human Computation 1:2:185-199 DOI: 10.15346/hc.v1i2.9
- Bland, R. 2008. "The development and future of the Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme," in S Thomas and P Stone (eds.), Metal Detecting and Archaeology, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 63-85.
- Dunn, S. And Hedges, M. 2013. "Crowd-sourcing as a Component of Humanities Research Infrastructures." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7.1, 147-169. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2013.0086
- Gill, D. 2010. "The Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act: Protecting the Archaeology of England and Wales?" Papers of the Institute of Archaeology 20, 1-11. Available: http://www.pia-journal.co.uk/3/volume/20/issue/0/ (you may also find the other short papers in this volume of interest)
- Orlandi, S. 2016. "Ancient Inscriptions between Citizens and Scholars: The Double Soul of the EAGLE Project." In Romanello M. & Bodard G, Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press. Available: https://doi.org/10.5334/bat.l
- Ridge, Mia (2016). Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research. PhD thesis Open University. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/45519/
- Robbins, K. 2013. "Balancing the scales: exploring the variable effects of collection bias on data collected by the Portable Antiquities Scheme." Landscapes 14.1, 54-72.
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The goal of this exercise is to gain practical experience with crowdsourcing projects. This will help you understand why people volunteer their time; give you a sense of common tasks and workflows; and develop your skills and language for describing and critiquing sites.
These browsers tend to work better than Internet Explorer etc.
Depending on your interests, you may want to try:
- Zooniverse's science / history projects (portal) https://www.zooniverse.org/
- Micropasts's cultural heritage projects (portal) http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/project/category/featured/
- The British Library's LibCrowds projects https://www.libcrowds.com/
- The British Library's Georeferencer http://www.bl.uk/georeferencer/
- Biodiversity and historical projects at the Smithsonian (portal) https://transcription.si.edu/
- Library of Congress 'Crowd' (portal) https://crowd.loc.gov/
- NYPL Transcript Editor (oral histories) http://transcribe.oralhistory.nypl.org/
- Trove (newspapers - find an article then look for text that needs correcting) https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
- Colored Conventions http://coloredconventions.org/
- DIY History http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
- NYPL Building Inspector http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/
- FromThePage projects (manuscript text) https://fromthepage.com/dashboard
- Operation War Diary http://operationwardiary.org/
- Transcribe Bentham http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/
- HistoryPin's various types of projects (portal) https://www.historypin.org/en/collections/
- Flickr Commons https://www.flickr.com/commons/
- Our Marathon, the Boston Bombing Digital Archive https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/our-marathon/
If you have a particular interest, please ask for suggestions. NB: some sites may require registration. Others may not immediately appear to be a crowdsourcing site.
Once the front page has loaded, ask yourself:
- How effective is the front page at making you want to participate in a project? How does it achieve that?
- Notice any other responses or questions that arise. For example, did you feel any friction or barriers to starting, points of anxiety or uncertainty?
- At first impressions, does the project appear to be making progress towards its goals? Do public contributions seem valued? Why/why not?
Try a project for a few minutes, then be prepared to discuss your experience. For example, think about...
- Is the first step toward participating obvious?
- Are the types of task, source material and desired outputs clear to you?
- Can you tell who the project wants to reach?
- How does their text and imagery motivate you to start or continue contributing?
- How are participants rewarded? Does the reward feel appropriate?
- Would you come back and try this project in your own time? Why, or why not?
- How are contributions validated or checked?
- Can you ask questions or get help?
- How productive, successful does the site seem overall? How might you tweak the design to improve it?