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Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Sector: approaches, challenges and issues
- 1. Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Sector: approaches, challenges and issues Mia Ridge, @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library Crowd-sourcing, Co-creation and Co-curation in the Cultural Sector Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation Glasgow, December 2015
- 2. Overview
- 3. What is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, Wired, 2006): 'taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call' Or, as Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus, 'the spare processing power of millions of human brains‘ Or, simply, volunteering online
- 4. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage Asking the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. The activities and/or goals should be inherently rewarding.
- 6. • 19th Century natural history collecting • 1849 Smithsonian weather observation project • 1857, 1879 Oxford English Dictionary appeals • WWII Soldiers given a Field Collector's Manual in Natural History by the US Museum of Natural History James Murray, editor, OED, with contributor slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:James-Murray.jpg Crowdsourcing before the web
- 7. Examples
- 8. reCAPTCHA
- 11. Old Weather: structured transcription http://oldweather.org/
- 12. Letters of 1916: full-text transcription
- 14. British Library Sound Maps: collecting Your accents http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/Your-Accents http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-Maps/UK-Soundmap
- 15. Year of the Bay: history mysteries http://yearofthebay.org/
- 17. And so to...
- 18. Participatory project models Contributory The public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation Collaborative Public and organisation are active partners, but project is lead by the organisation Co-creative All partners define goals together (Bonney et al, 2009,Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE)
- 19. New approaches
- 21. Simple tasks as stepping stones http://www.fossilfinder.org/
- 23. The growth of platforms
- 28. Going off-piste '...None of the above is ready to send to you as I have more research to do' https://www.flickr.com/photos/swedish_heritage_board/10207262464
- 29. Balancing acts
- 30. Planning a graceful exit https://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545543824
- 31. Thank you! Questions? Mia Ridge @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library ‘Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Sector: approaches, challenges and issues’ Crowd-sourcing, Co-creation and Co-curation in the Cultural Sector Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for the invitation to speak, and to the organisers who brought us all together here today. My goal is to give you a quick overview of what we mean when we talk about crowdsourcing in the cultural sector; show you some key examples, and some new approaches, then discuss some of the challenges and issues we face in crowdsourcing our cultural heritage.
- Where it came from... Open call to unknown people sometimes scares people in cultural heritage. Problematic coining - not usually a crowd or outsourcing - but a bit late now. I've given two other ways of looking at it, both closer to hobbies, leisure activities.
- My definition – partly proscriptive as well as descriptive. Tasks like tagging, collecting, transcribing, describing cultural heritage collections, undertaken by distributed, possibly anonymous participants. Participation possibly as altrustic or intrinsically-motivated 'volunteers', or as side-effect of playing games or own work on cultural / historical materials. No financial rewards so has to be rewarding.
- Why am I talking about this? Worked in museums for a long time, got interested in opportunity between public engagement and need to enhance collections. Made games c2010, then did PhD in digital history, including crowdsourcing as a stepping stone to engagement with the practices and skills of history. Edited a book.
- Lots of e.g.s, but to pick one - OED realised couldn’t do everything; asked for help sourcing words for dictionary, but then had to check and coordinate the results. The models for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage pre-date the web, but computers have made the process of reaching contributors, and coordinating and validating contributions infinitely faster. James Murray worked from the slips of paper shown behind him; received and send so much mail they installed a post box outside his house. No more!
- Lots of types of tasks and output data, source materials, validation methods, organisational structures, goals...
- You've all helped correct text (or transcribe audio)
- Designed to let people get on with correcting errors they'd come across when doing their work but satisfying enough task that people do it for fun.
- Old Weather is a 'Zooniverse' project that aims to extract weather information from historic ships logs for use by climate scientists. The 'Zooniverse' is the organisation behind many citizen science projects, some of which have developed into partial citizen history projects.
- You may already know this one. The power of finding the right audience, particularly through something as fast as social media. There are a lot of map fans in the world and they were eager to interact with the BL's collection. People started tweeting about it and by the time the Press Release was ready, all the maps were georeferenced. (The National Library of Scotland used the same software on their maps around the same time, but didn't use social media to promote it, and had nothing like the same result.) Maps get harder each time it's run... Screenshot from second run (IIRC) http://www.bl.uk/maps/index.html
- Collecting new material. Had moderation because had to check for copyrighted material. E.g. of a) collecting new material and b) non-text, image material
- Requests to find information such as dates and locations for photographs or paintings - needs to either pique someone's curiosity so they go and investigate, or land in front of the right person who already knows. Beyond the microtask
- There is a long tradition of avocational historians, sometimes working on collaborative projects - local historians in the UK sometimes undertake long-term, complex projects. FreeBMD began in 1998 to 'provide free Internet access to the Civil Registration index information from England and Wales'. It has over 250 million records.
- Crowdsourcing is usually contributory, though more ambitious projects aim to be collaborative or co-creative. Collaboration and co-creation take more time and in some cases new attitude/skills. Model comes from public participation in scientific research, so assumes some expert input; may not be in the case in grassroots projects
- Gives people a chance to get familiar with the material before trying other tasks
- Tiny tasks that collectively contribute to getting all the needed data
- Platforms like historypin, zooniverse's panoptes and crowdcrafter mean it's relatively simple to get a project started on platforms that were designed specifically for crowdsourcing.
- Tiny screens and lack of physical keyboards a challenge but big opportunity re leisure time
- Takes time, energy!
- Lots of projects around; people will compare yours to others
- Sometimes participants get distracted by the task
- Find balance between participants' interests and organisational goals, even in projects that seem purely contributory
- With any luck, one day you will run out of content to crowdsource - what then? Where does your community go?
- My dream for machine learning!