Category: Crowdsourcing and design for participation

About 'a practical guide to crowdsourcing in cultural heritage'

book cover

Some time ago I wrote a chapter on 'Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects' for the Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities, edited by Kristen Schuster and Stuart Dunn. As their blurb says, the volume 'draws on both traditional and emerging fields of study to consider what a grounded definition of quantitative and qualitative research in the Digital Humanities (DH) might mean; which areas DH can fruitfully draw on in order to foster and develop that understanding; where we can see those methods applied; and what the future directions of research methods in Digital Humanities might look like'.

Inspired by a post from the authors of a chapter in the same volume (Opening the ‘black box’ of digital cultural heritage processes: feminist digital humanities and critical heritage studies by Hannah Smyth, Julianne Nyhan & Andrew Flinn), I'm sharing something about what I wanted to do in my chapter.

As the title suggests, I wanted to provide practical insights for cultural heritage and digital humanities practitioners. Writing for a Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities was an opportunity help researchers understand both how to apply the 'method' and how the 'behind the scenes' work affects the outcomes. As a method, crowdsourcing in cultural heritage touches on many more methods and disciplines. The chapter built on my doctoral research, and my ideas were roadtested at many workshops, classes and conferences.

Rather than crib from my introduction (which you can read in a pre-edited version online), I've included the headings from the chapter as a guide to the contents:

  • An introduction to crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
  • Key conceptual and research frameworks
  • Fundamental concepts in cultural heritage crowdsourcing
  • Why do cultural heritage institutions support crowdsourcing projects?
  • Why do people contribute to crowdsourcing projects?
  • Turning crowdsourcing ideas into reality
  • Planning crowdsourcing projects
  • Defining 'success' for your project
  • Managing organisational impact
  • Choosing source collections
  • Planning workflows and data re-use
  • Planning communications and participant recruitment
  • Final considerations: practical and ethical ‘reality checks’
  • Developing and testing crowdsourcing projects
  • Designing the ‘onboarding’ experience
  • Task design
  • Documentation and tutorials
  • Quality control: validation and verification systems
  • Rewards and recognition
  • Running crowdsourcing projects
  • Launching a project
  • The role of participant discussion
  • Ongoing community engagement
  • Planning a graceful exit
  • The future of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
  • Thanks and acknowledgements

I wrote in the open on this Google Doc: 'Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects', and benefited from the feedback I got during that process, so this post is also an opportunity to highlight and reiterate my 'Thanks and acknowledgements' section:

I would like to thank participants and supporters of crowdsourcing projects I’ve created, including Museum Metadata Games, In their own words: collecting experiences of the First World War, and In the Spotlight. I would also like to thank my co-organisers and attendees at the Digital Humanities 2016 Expert Workshop on the future of crowdsourcing. Especial thanks to the participants in courses and workshops on ‘crowdsourcing in cultural heritage’, including the British Library’s Digital Scholarship training programme, the HILT Digital Humanities summer school (once with Ben Brumfield) and scholars at other events where the course was held, whose insights, cynicism and questions have informed my thinking over the years. Finally, thanks to Meghan Ferriter and Victoria Van Hyning for their comments on this manuscript.

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Useful distractions: help cultural heritage and scientific projects from home

Today I came across the term 'terror-scrolling', a good phrase to describe the act of glancing from one COVID-19 update to another. While you can check out galleries, libraries, archives and museums content online or explore the ebooks, magazines and other digital items available from your local library, you might also want to help online projects from scientific and cultural heritage organisations. You can call it 'online volunteering' or 'crowdsourcing', but the key point is that these projects offer a break from the everyday while contributing to a bigger goal.

Not commuting at the moment? Need to channel some energy into something positive? You can help transcribe historical text that computers can't read, or sort scientific images. And don't worry – these sites will let you know what skills are required, you can often try a task before registering, and they have built-in methods for dealing with any mistakes you might make at the start.

Here's a list of sites that have a variety of different kinds of tasks / content to work on:

Some of these sites offer projects in languages other than English, and I've collected additional multi-lingual / international sites at Crowdsourcing the world’s heritage – I'm working on an update that'll make it easy to find current, live projects but (ironically, for someone who loves taking part in projects) I can't spend much time at my desk right now so it's not ready just yet.

Keynote online: 'Reaching out: museums, crowdsourcing and participatory heritage'

In September I was invited to give a keynote at the Museum Theme Days 2016 in Helsinki. I spoke on 'Reaching out: museums, crowdsourcing and participatory heritage. In lieu of my notes or slides, the video is below. (Great image, thanks YouTube!)

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, citizen science – September 2016

More new projects and project updates I've noticed over September 2016.

Gillian Lattimore @Irl_HeritageDig has posted some of her dissertation research on Crowdsourcing Motivations in a GLAM Context: A Research Survey of Transcriber Motivations of the Meitheal Dúchas.ie Crowdsourcing Project. dúchas.ie is 'a project to digitize the National Folklore Collection of Ireland, one of the largest folklore collections in the world'.

A long read on Brighton Pavilion and Museums’ Map The Museum, '#HeritageEveryware Map The Museum: connecting collections to the street' includes some great insights from Kevin Bacon.

Meghan Ferriter and Christine Rosenfeld have produced a special edition of a journal, 'Exploring the Smithsonian Institution Transcription Center' with articles on 'Crowdsourcing as Practice and Method in the Smithsonian Transcription Center' and more.

Two YouGov posts on American and British people's knowledge of their recent family history provide some useful figures on how many people in each region have researched family history.

Richard Light's posted some interesting questions and feedback for crowdsourcing projects at The GB1900.org project – first look.

'Archiving the Civil War’s Text Messages' provides more information about the Decoding the Civil War project.

Zooniverse blog post 'Why Cyclone Center is the CrockPot of citizen science projects' gives some insight into why some projects appear 'slower' than others.

A December 2015 post, 'How a citizen science app with over 70,000 users is creating local community' (HT Jill Nugent ‏@ntxscied) and an interesting contrast to 'Volunteer field technicians are bad for wildlife ecology'. A nice quote from the first piece: 'Young says that the number one thing that keeps iNaturalist users involved is the community that they create: “meeting other people who are into the same thing I am”'.

iNaturalist Bioblitz's are also more evidence for the value of time-limited challenges, or as they describe them, 'a communal citizen-science effort to record as many species within a designated location and time period as possible'.

Micropasts continue to add historical and archaeological projects.

Survey of London and CASA launched the Histories of Whitechapel website, providing 'a new interactive map for exploring the Survey’s ongoing research into Whitechapel' and 'inviting people to submit their own memories, research, photographs, and videos of the area to help us uncover Whitechapel’s long and rich history'.

New Zooniverse project Mapping Change: 'Help us use over a century's worth of specimens to map the distribution of animals, plants, and fungi. Your data will let us know where species have been and predict where they may end up in the future!'

New Europeana project Europeana Transcribe: 'a crowdsourcing initiative for the transcription of digital material from the First World War, compiled by Europeana 1914-1918. With your help, we can create a vast and fully digital record of personal documents from the collection.'

'Holiday pictures help preserve the memory of world heritage sites' introduces Curious Travellers, a 'data-mining and crowd sourced infrastructure to help with digital documentation of archaeological sites, monuments and heritage at risk'. Or in non-academese, send them your photos and videos of threatened historic sites, particularly those in 'North Africa, including Cyrene in Libya, as well as those in Syria and the Middle East'.

I've added two new international projects, Les herbonautes, a French herbarium transcription project led by the Paris Natural History Museum, and Loki a Finnish project on maritime, coastal history to my post on Crowdsourcing the world's heritage – as always, let me know of other projects that should be included.

 

Survey of London
Survey of London site

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, citizen science – recent updates

A small* collection of links from the past little while.

Projects

  • A new Zooniverse project, Decoding the Civil War, launched in June: 'Witness the United States Civil War by transcribing and deciphering messages and codes from the United States Military Telegraph'.
  • Another Zooniverse project, Camera CATalogue: 'Analyze Wildlife Photos to Help Panthera Protect Big Cats'.

Articles

  • Palmer, Stuart, and Deb Verhoeven, ‘Crowdfunding Academic Researchers–the Importance of Academic Social Media Profiles’, in ECSM 2016: Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Social Media (Academic Conferences and Publishing International, 2016), pp. 291–299
  • Preece, Jennifer, ‘Citizen Science: New Research Challenges for Human–Computer Interaction’, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 32 (2016), 585–612 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2016.1194153>
  • Dillon, Justin, Robert B. Stevenson, and Arjen E. J. Wals, ‘Introduction: Special Section: Moving from Citizen to Civic Science to Address Wicked Conservation Problems’, Conservation Biology, 30 (2016), 450–55 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12689> – has an interesting new model, putting citizen sciences 'on a continuum from highly instrumental forms driven by experts or science to more emancipatory forms driven by public concern. The variations explain why citizens participate in CS and why scientists participate too. To advance the conversation, we distinguish between three strands or prototypes: science-driven CS, policy-driven CS, and transition-driven civic science.'
    …

    'We combined Jickling and Wals’ (2008) heuristic for understanding environmental and sustainability education (Jickling & Wals 2008) and M. Fox and R. Gibson's problem typology (Fig. 1) to provide an overview of the different possible configurations of citizen science (Fig. 2). The heuristic has 2 axes. We call the horizontal axis the participation axis, along which extend the possibilities (increasing from left to right) for stakeholders, including the public, to participate in setting the agenda; determining the questions to be addressed; deciding the mechanisms and tools to be used; choosing how to monitor, evaluate, and interpret data; and choosing the course of action to take. The vertical (goal) axis shows the possibilities for autonomy and self-determination in setting goals and objectives. The resulting quadrants correspond to a particular strand of citizen science. All three occupied quadrants are important and legitimate.'

    A heuristic of citizen science based on Wals and Jickling (2008).
    A heuristic of citizen science based on Wals and Jickling (2008). From Dillon, Justin, Robert B. Stevenson, and Arjen E. J. Wals (2016)

    * It's a short list this month as I've been busy and things seem quieter over the northern hemisphere summer.

Crowdsourcing workshop at DH2016 – session overview

A quick signal boost for the collaborative notes taken at the DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing? (held in Kraków, Poland, on 12 July as part of the Digital Humanities 2016 conference, abstract below). We'd emphasised the need to document the unconference-style sessions (see FAQ) so that future projects could benefit from the collective experiences of participants. Since it can be impossible to find Google Docs or past tweets, I've copied the session overview below. The text is a summary of key takeaways or topics discussed in each session, created in a plenary session at the end of the workshop.

Participant introductions and interests – live notes
Ethics, Labour, sensitive material

Key takeaway – questions for projects to ask at the start; don't impose your own ethics on a project, discussing them is start of designing the project.

 Where to start
Engaging volunteers, tips including online communities, being open to levels of contribution, being flexible, setting up standards, quality		 Workflow, lifecycle, platforms
What people were up to, the problems with hacking systems together, iiif.io, flexibility and workflows
Public expertise, education, what’s unique to humanities crowdsourcing
The humanities are contestable! Responsibility to give the public back the results of the process in re-usable		 Options, schemas and goals for text encoding
Encoding systems will depend on your goals; full-text transcription always has some form of encoding, data models – who decides what it is, and when? Then how are people guided to use it?Trying to avoid short-term solutions
UX, flow, motivation
Making tasks as small as possible; creating a sense of contribution; creating a space for volunteers to communicate; potential rewards, issues like badgefication and individual preferences. Supporting unexpected contributions; larger-scale tasks
Project scale – thinking ahead to ending projects technically, and in terms of community – where can life continue after your project ends		 Finding and engaging volunteers
Using social media, reliance on personal networks, super-transcribers, problematic individuals who took more time than they gave to the project. Successful strategies are very-project dependent. Something about beer (production of Itinera Nova beer with label containing info on the project and link to website).		 Ecosystems and automatic transcription
Makes sense for some projects, but not all – value in having people engage with the text. Ecosystem – depending on goals, which parts work better? Also as publication – editions, corpora – credit, copyright, intellectual property
Plenary session, possible next steps – put information into a wiki. Based around project lifecycle, critical points? Publication in an online journal? Updateable, short-ish case studies. Could be categorised by different attributes. Flexible, allows for pace of change. Illustrate principles, various challenges.

Short-term action: post introductions, project updates and new blog posts, research, etc to https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CROWDSOURCING – a central place to send new conference papers, project blog posts, questions, meet-ups.

The workshop abstract:

Crowdsourcing – asking the public to help with inherently rewarding tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge – is reasonably well established in the humanities and cultural heritage sector. The success of projects such as Transcribe Bentham, Old Weather and the Smithsonian Transcription Center in processing content and engaging participants, and the subsequent development of crowdsourcing platforms that make launching a project easier, have increased interest in this area. While emerging best practices have been documented in a growing body of scholarship, including a recent report from the Crowd Consortium for Libraries and Archives symposium, this workshop looks to the next 5 – 10 years of crowdsourcing in the humanities, the sciences and in cultural heritage. The workshop will gather international experts and senior project staff to document the lessons to be learnt from projects to date and to discuss issues we expect to be important in the future.

Photo by Digital Humanities ‏@DH_Western
Photo by Digital Humanities ‏@DH_Western

The workshop is organised by Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter (Smithsonian Transcription Centre), Christy Henshaw (Wellcome Library) and Ben Brumfield (FromThePage).

If you're new to crowdsourcing, here's a reading list created for another event.

 

April news in crowdsourcing, citizen science, citizen history

Another quick post with news on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, citizen science and citizen history in April(ish) 2016…

Acceptances for our DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing? have been sent out. If you missed the boat, don't panic! We're taking a few more applications on a rolling basis to allow for people with late travel approval for the DH2016 conference in July.

Probably the biggest news is the launch of citizenscience.gov, as it signals the importance of citizen science and crowdsourcing to the US government.

From the press release: 'the White House announced that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has partnered with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS), a Trust instrumentality of the U.S. Government, to launch CitizenScience.gov as the new hub for citizen science and crowdsourcing initiatives in the public sector.

CitizenScience.gov provides information, resources, and tools for government personnel and citizens actively engaged in or looking to participate in citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. … Citizen science and crowdsourcing are powerful approaches that engage the public and provide multiple benefits to the Federal government, volunteer participants, and society as a whole.'

There's also work to 'standardize data and metadata related to citizen science, allowing for greater information exchange and collaboration both within individual projects and across different projects'.

Other news:

Responses to questions about if the volunteers agreed that the Zooniverse… From Science Learning via Participation in Online Citizen Science

Have I missed something important? Let me know in the comments or @mia_out.

SXSW, project anniversaries and more – news on heritage crowdsourcing

Photo of programme
Our panel listing at SXSW

I've just spent two weeks in Texas, enjoying the wonderful hospitality and probing questions after giving various talks at universities in Houston and Austin before heading to SXSW. I was there for a panel on 'Build the Crowdsourcing Community of Your Dreams' (link to our slides and collected resources) with Ben Brumfield, Siobhan Leachman, and Meghan Ferriter. Siobhan, a 'super-volunteer' in more ways than one, posted her talk notes on 'How cultural institutions encouraged me to participate in crowdsourcing & the factors I consider before donating my time'.

In other news, we (me, Ben, Meghan and Christy Henshaw from the Wellcome Library) have had a workshop accepted for the Digital Humanities 2016 conference, to be held in Kraków in July. We're looking for people with different kinds of expertise for our DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing?.  You can apply via this form.

One of the questions at our SXSW panel was about crowdsourcing in teaching, which reminded me of this recent post on 'The War Department in the Classroom' in which Zayna Bizri 'describes her approach to using the Papers of the War Department in the classroom and offers suggestions for those who wish to do the same'. In related news, the PWD project is now five years old! There's also this post on Primary School Zooniverse Volunteers.

The Science Gossip project is one year old, and they're asking their contributors to decide which periodicals they'll work on next and to start new discussions about the documents and images they find interesting.

The History Harvest project have released their Handbook (PDF).

The Danish Nationalmuseet is having a 'Crowdsource4dk' crowdsourcing event on April 9. You can also transcribe Churchill's WWII daily appointments, 1939 – 1945 or take part in Old Weather: Whaling (and there's a great Hyperallergic post with lots of images about the whaling log books).

I've seen a few interesting studentships and jobs posted lately, hinting at research and projects to come. There's a funded PhD in HCI and online civic engagement and a (now closed) studentship on Co-creating Citizen Science for Innovation.

And in old news, this 1996 post on FamilySearch's collaborative indexing is a good reminder that very little is entirely new in crowdsourcing.

From grey dots to trenches to field books – news in heritage crowdsourcing

Apparently you can finish a thesis but you can't stop scanning for articles and blog posts on your topic. Sharing them here is a good way to shake the 'I should be doing something with this' feeling.* This is a fairly random sample of recent material, but if people find it useful I can go back and pull out other things I've collected.

Victoria Van Hyning, ‘What’s up with those grey dots?’ you ask – brief blog post on using software rather than manual processes to review multiple text transcriptions, and on the interface challenges that brings.

Melissa Terras, 'Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities' – pre-print PDF for a chapter in A New Companion to Digital Humanities.

Richard Grayson, 'A Life in the Trenches? The Use of Operation War Diary and Crowdsourcing Methods to Provide an Understanding of the British Army’s Day-to-Day Life on the Western Front' – a peer-reviewed article based on data created through Operation War Diary.

The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement – a poster by Lesley Parilla and Meghan Ferriter reported on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog.

The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement

Ben Brumfield, Crowdsourcing Transcription Failures – a response to a mailing list post asking 'where are the failures?'

And finally, something related to my interest in participatory history commons – Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library – Central Library launches Memory Lab, a 'DIY space where you can digitize your home movies, scan photographs and slides, and learn how to care for your physical and digital family heirlooms'. I was so excited when I about this project – it's addressing such important issues. Jaime Mears is blogging about the project.

 

* How long after a PhD does it take for that feeling to go? Asking for a friend.

Exercises for 'The basics of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage'

I'm running a workshop (at a Knowledge Exchange event organised by the Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation and the Museums Galleries Scotland Digital Transformation Network) to help people get started with crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. These exercises are designed to give participants some hands-on experience with existing projects while developing their ability to discuss the elements of successful crowdsourcing projects. They are also an opportunity to appreciate the importance of design and text in marketing a project, and the role of user experience design in creating projects that attract and retain contributors.

Exercise: compare front pages

Choose two of the sites below to review.

The most important question to keep in mind is: how effective is the front page at making you want to participate in a project? How does it achieve that?

Exercise: try some crowdsourcing projects

Try one of the sites listed above; others are listed in this post; non-English language sites are listed here. You can also ask for suggestions!

Attributes to discuss include:

The overall 'call to action'

  • Is the first step toward participating obvious?
  • Is the type of task, source material and output obvious?

Probable audience

  • Can you tell who the project wants to reach?
  • Does text relate to their motivations for starting, continuing?
  • How are they rewarded?
  • Are there any barriers to their participation?

Data input and data produced

  • What kinds of tasks create that data?
  • How are contributions validated?

How productive, successful does the site seem overall?

Exercise: lessons from game design

  • Go to http://git.io/2048
  • Spend 2 minutes trying it out
  • Did you understand what to do?
  • Did you want to keep playing?

Exercise: your plans

Some questions to help make ideas into reality:

  • Who already loves and/or uses your collections?
  • Which material needs what kind of work?
  • Do any existing platforms meet most of your needs?
  • What potential barriers could you turn into tasks?
  • How will you resource community interaction?
  • How would a project support your mission, engagement strategy and digitisation goals?