Author: mia

National approaches to crowdsourcing / citizen science?

This is a 'work in progress' post that I hope to add to as I gather information about national portals for crowdsourcing / citizen science / citizen history and other forms of voluntary digital / online participation.

While portals like SciStarter, Crowds4U and platforms like Zooniverse, FromThePage, HistoryPin etc are a great way to search across projects for something that matches your interests, I'm interested in the growth of national portals or indexes to projects (they might also be called 'project finders'). It's not so much the sites themselves that interest me as the underlying networks of regional communities of practice, national or regional infrastructure and other signs of national support that they might variously reflect or help create. If you're interested in specific projects outside the UK-US/English-language bubble, check out Crowdsourcing the world's heritage. I've also shared a 2015 list of 'participatory digital heritage sites' that includes many crowdsourcing sites.

If you know of a national portal or umbrella organisation for crowdsourcing, please drop me a line! Last updated: Feb 7, 2023.

Austria

Jan Smeddinck emailed to share the LBG Open Innovation in Science Center https://ois.lbg.ac.at/

Brazil

Lesandro Ponciano nominated 'Civis, which is the Brazilian Citizen Science platform. The link is https://civis.ibict.br/ Civis was built by using the same software developed by Ibercivis in Spain for the eu-citizen.science platform. Civis was launched in 2022 – the event (in Portuguese) is recorded on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/live/_nPqmcq0gos '

Canada

The Canadian Citizen Science portal

France

This post was inspired by the apparently coordinated approach in France. The Archives nationales participatives site has 'Projets collaboratifs de transcriptions, annotations et indexations' – that is, participatory national archives with collaborative transcription, annotation and indexing projects.

They also have Le réseau Particip-Arc, a 'network of actors committed to participatory science in the fields of culture', supported by the Ministry of Culture and coordinated by the National Museum of Natural History.

European Union

EU-citizen.science is a 'platform for sharing citizen science projects, resources, tools, training and much more'.

Germany / German-language projects

The German / German-language citizen science portal

Netherlands

Alastair Dunning pointed to the Citizen Science network, run by @CitSciLab (Margaret Gold).

Norway

Agata Bochynska said, 'Norway has recently formed a national network for citizen science that’s coordinated by Research Council of Norway' – Nasjonalt nettverk for folkeforskning (folkeforskning translates as 'folk research' according to Google).

Scotland

The Scottish Citizen Science portal

Slovenia

https://citizenscience.si/ lists current and completed citizen science projects in Slovenia, infrastructure available to support projects, and events and other activities. Hat tip Mitja V. Iskrić on mastodon.

Sweden

David Haskiya reports: 'medborgarforskning.se/ Provides an intro to citizen science, a catalogue of Swedish projects, etc. Seems to be part of an EU-network of such sites. Summary in English here https://medborgarforskning.se/eng/'

A Swedish national hub for everyone interested in citizen science (medborgarforskning). The project was funded by Vinnova – Sweden’s innovation agency, the University of Gothenburg, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå University.

There's more on medborgarforskning at Mass experiments and a new national platform – Citizen Science in Sweden.

United Kingdom

gov.uk lists some volunteering portals but they don't make it easy to find online-only opportunities.

United Nations

https://app.unv.org/ lists online and on-site (i.e. in-person) opportunities around the world, although some of them might stretch the definition of 'voluntary roles'.

Wales

Rita Singer reports: 'In Wales, we have the People's Collection, which functions as a citizen archive of Wales' history and heritage.' https://www.peoplescollection.wales/

Crowdsourcing as connection: a constant star over a sea of change / Établir des connexions: un invariant des projets de crowdsourcing

As I'm speaking today at an event that's mostly in French, I'm sharing my slides outline so it can be viewed at leisure, or copy-and-pasted into a translation tool like Google Translate.

Colloque de clôture du projet Testaments de Poilus, Les Archives nationales de France, 25 Novembre 2022

Crowdsourcing as connection: a constant star over a sea of change, Mia Ridge, British Library

GLAM values as a guiding star

(Or, how will AI change crowdsourcing?) My argument is that technology is changing rapidly around us, but our skills in connecting people and collections are as relevant as ever:

  • Crowdsourcing connects people and collections
  • AI is changing GLAM work
  • But the values we express through crowdsourcing can light the way forward

(GLAM – galleries, libraries, archives and museums)

A sea of change

AI-based tools can now do many crowdsourced tasks:

  • Transcribe audio; typed and handwritten text
  • Classify / label images and text – objects, concepts, 'emotions'

AI-based tools can also generate new images, text

  • Deep fakes, emerging formats – collecting and preservation challenges

AI is still work-in-progress

Automatic transcription, translation failure from this morning: 'the encephalogram is no longer the mother of weeks'

  • Results have many biases; cannot be used alone
  • White, Western, 21st century view
  • Carbon footprint
  • Expertise and resources required
  • Not easily integrated with GLAM workflows

Why bother with crowdsourcing if AI will soon be 'good enough'?

The elephant in the room; been on my mind for a couple of years now

The rise of AI means we have to think about the role of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. Why bother if software can do it all?

Crowdsourcing brings collections to life

  • Close, engaged attention to 'obscure' collection items
  • Opportunities for lifelong learning; historical and scientific literacy
  • Gathers diverse perspectives, knowledge

Crowdsourcing as connection

Crowdsourcing in GLAMs is valuable in part because it creates connections around people and collections

  • Between volunteers and staff
  • Between people and collections
  • Between collections

Examples from the British Library

In the Spotlight: designing for productivity and engagement

Living with Machines: designing crowdsourcing projects in collaboration with data scientists that attempt to both engage the public with our research and generate research datasets. Participant comments and questions inspired new tasks, shaped our work.

How do we follow the star?

Bringing 'crowdsourcing as connection' into work with AI

Valuing 'crowdsourcing as connection'

  • Efficiency isn't everything. Participation is part of our mission
  • Help technologists and researchers understand the value in connecting people with collections
  • Develop mutual understanding of different types of data – editions, enhancement, transcription, annotation
  • Perfection isn't everything – help GLAM staff define 'data quality' in different contexts
  • Where is imperfect, AI data at scale more useful than perfect but limited data?
  • 'réinjectée' – when, where, and how?
  • How does crowdsourcing, AI change work for staff?
  • How do we integrate data from different sources (AI, crowdsourcing, cataloguers), at different scales, into coherent systems?
  • How do interfaces show data provenance, confidence?

Transforming access, discovery, use

  • A single digitised item can be infinitely linked to places, people, concepts – how does this change 'discovery'?
  • What other user needs can we meet through a combination of AI, better data systems and public participation?

Merci de votre attention!

Pour en savoir plus: https://bl.uk/digital https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk

Essayez notre activité de crowdsourcing: http://bit.ly/LivingWithMachines

Nous attendons vos questions: digitalresearch@bl.uk

Screenshot of images generated by AI, showing variations on dark blue or green seas and shining stars
Versions of image generation for the text 'a bright star over the sea'
Presenting at Les Archives nationales de France, Paris, from home

Experimenting with Mastodon

I'd signed up to mastodon.cloud during an earlier twitter kerfuffle in 2017, then with ausglam.space in January last year, and glammr.us on a whim. [Edit to add, I've taken the plunge and migrated to hcommons.social/@mia as my main account].

2008-era Nokia phone with a tweet on the screen: @miaridge 'those twitters on screen are really distracting me at #mw2008'
Tweet from Museums and the Web 2008 'complaining' about being distracted by a twitterfall (remember that?) screen

This week I've gone back and taken another look. (So that's me, me and me). The energy that's poured in must be quite disconcerting for long-term users, but making new connections and thinking differently about how I want to post on social media has been quite exhilarating. It's also been a chance to think about what twitter's meant for me in the nearly 15 years I've been posting.

I've realised how constrained my tweeting has become over time, and in particular how a sense of surveillance has sucked the joy out of posting. The idea that an employer's HR, a tabloid journalist, or someone on the lookout to take offence could seize on something and blow it up – the uncertainty about how things could be taken out of context and take on a life of their own – had a chilling effect.

[Edited to add, also I've never stopped being annoyed about the way Twitter turned 'stars' into 'likes' or hearts, then shared them into timelines, as described well in this guide to Mastodon. I also acted defensively against the worst changes in twitter – my location is set to Jordan so that trending topics are in Arabic and therefore unreadable to me (except when BTS fans take over); I use the 'latest' view if I have to use Twitter's own client; and I normally use clients that only show things that people I follow have consciously tweeted, not random 'likes'.]

15 years is a long time, and I've also had to be more thoughtful about what I post as my job titles and institutions have changed. Lots of us have grown up while on the site, and benefited hugely from the conversations, friendships, provocations and more we've found there.

Twitter completely transformed events for me – you could find like-minded folk in a crowd as talks were live tweeted. Some of those conversations have continued for years. I have fond memories of making good trouble at events like Museums and the Web (and of course the Museums Computer Group's events) with people I met via their tweets.

I'll also miss the sheer size of Twitter that made random searches so interesting. You could search on any word you liked and get so many glimpses into other lives and ways of being in the world. I've never understood the 'town square' thing but it was a brilliant coffee shop. [Edit to add: that ability to search out very specific terms is also part of the surveillance vibe – it's easy to search for terms to get upset about, or to find a tweet posted to a few hundred people and pull it out of context. Mastodon apparently only allows searches on hashtagged terms, as explained in this post, so the original poster has to consciously make a word publicly searchable]

Over time, we've lost many voices as some people found twitter too toxic, or too time-consuming. Post-2016, it's been much harder to love a platform so full of harmful misinformation. At the moment this definitely feels like the last days of twitter, though I'm sure lots of us will keep our accounts, even if we don't go there as much.

If twitter doesn't last, thank thanks to everyone who's kept me entertained, changed how I think about things, commiserated, cheered me up, shared wins and losses over the years.

My IFPH panel notes, 'shared authority as work in progress'

I'm in Berlin for the International Council for Public History 20202 #IFPH2022 conference, where I'm on a panel on 'Revisiting A Shared Authority in the Age of Digital Public History'. It's part of a working group with Thomas Cauvin (Luxembourg), Michael Frisch (United States), Serge Noiret (Italy), Mark Tebeau (United States), Mia Ridge (United Kingdom), Sharon Leon (United States), Rebecca Wingo (United States), Dominique Santana (Luxembourg), Violeta Tsenova (Luxembourg). My panel notes will make more sense in that wider context, but I'm sharing them here for reference.

Shared authority as work in progress

What does 'shared authority' mean to cultural heritage institutions? (Or GLAMs – galleries, libraries, archives and museums). The view will really depend on many factors, possibly including whether GLAM staff feel the need to do any professional gatekeeping, reserving 'library' or 'archive' professional status for themselves, much as some historians do more gatekeeping than others around who's allowed to say they're 'doing history'.

Thinking about ephemerality and what’s left of the processes of sharing authority a few years after it happens…

[Visual metaphor – think of the layers around the core of an onion. At the heart are collections, then catalogue metadata about those collections, often an additional layer of related metadata that doesn’t fit into the catalogue but is required for GLAM business, then public programmes including outreach and education, then there’s the unmediated access to collections and knowledge via social media and galleries]

I think GLAMs are getting comfortable with sharing, and shared authority. Crowdsourcing, in its many forms, is relatively common in GLAMs. Collaboration with Wikipedians of various sorts is widespread. There's a body of knowledge about co-curating exhibitions, community collecting and more, shared over conferences and publications and praxis. Texts and metadata and AV of all sorts have been created – usually *by* the public, *for* institutions.

Collaboration with other GLAMs on information standards and shared cataloguing has a long history, and those practices have moved online. [And now we’re sharing authority by putting records on wikidata, where they can be updated by anyone]

There's something interesting in the idea of the 'catalogue' as a source of authority. GLAM cataloguing practices are shaped by the needs of organisations – keeping track of their collections, adding information from structured vocabularies, perhaps adding extensive notes and bibliographies – for internal use and for their readers (particularly for libraries and archives), and by the commercial vendors that produce the cataloguing platforms. 

Cataloguing platforms often lag behind the needs of GLAMs, and have been slow to respond to requests to include sources of information outside the organisation. That may be because some of this work in sharing authority happens outside cataloguing and registrar teams, or because there's not one single, clear way in which cataloguing systems should change to include information from the community about collection items.

Some GLAMs are more challenged than others by thinking generously about where 'authority' resides. Researchers in reading rooms, or open collection stores are clearly visibly engaged with specialist research. Their discussions with reference staff will often reveal the depths of their knowledge about specific parts of a collection. Authority is already shared between readers and staff. However, the expertise (or authority) of the same readers is not visible when they use online collections – all online visits and searches look the same in Google Analytics unless you really delve into the reports. Similarly, a crowdsourcing participant transcribing text or tagging images might be entirely new to the source materials, or have a deep familiarity with them. Their questions and comments might reveal something of this, but the data recorded by a crowdsourcing platform lacks the social cues that might be present in an in-person conversation.

In the UK, generations of funding cuts have reduced the number of specialist curators in GLAMs. These days, curators are more likely to be generalists, selected for their ability to speak eloquently about collections and grasp the shape, significance and history of a collection quickly. Looking externally for authoritative information – whether the lived experience of communities who used or still care for similar items, or specialist academic and other researchers – is common.

It's important to remember that 'crowdsourcing' is a broad term that includes 'type what you see' tasks such as transcription or correction, tasks such as free-text tagging or information that rely on knowledge and experience, and more involved co-creative tasks such as organising projects or analysing results. But an important part of my definition is that each task contributes towards a shared, significant goal – if data isn't recorded somewhere, it's just 'user generated content'.

For me, the value of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is the intimate access it gives members of the public to collection items they would otherwise never encounter. As long as a project offers some way for participants to share things they've noticed, ask questions and mark items for their own use – in short, a way of reflecting on historical items – I consider that even 'simple' transcription tasks have the potential to be citizen history (or citizen science). 

The questions participants ask on my projects shape my own practice, and influence the development of new tasks and features – and in the last year helped shape an exhibition I co-curated with another museum curator. The same exhibition featured 'community comments', responses from people I or the museum have worked with over some time. Some of these comments were reflections from crowdsourcing volunteers on how their participation in the project changed how they thought about mechanisations in the 1800s (the subject of the exhibition).

Attitudes have shifted; data hasn't

However, years after folksonomies and web 2.0 were big news, the data the public creates through crowdsourcing is still difficult to integrate with existing catalogues. Flickr Commons, Omeka, Wikidata, Zooniverse and other platforms might hold information that would make collections more discoverable online, but it’s not easy to link data from those platforms to internal systems. That is in part because GLAM catalogues struggle with the granularity of digitised items – catalogues can help you order a book or archive box to a reading room, but they can't as easily store tags or research notes about what's on a particular page of that item. It's also in part because data nearly always needs reviewing and transforming before ingest. 

But is it also because GLAMs don't take shared authority seriously enough to advocate and pay for changes to their cataloguing systems to support them recording material from the public alongside internal data? Data that isn't in 'strategic' systems is more easily left behind when platforms migrate and staff move on.

This lack of flexibility in recording information from the public also plays out in ‘traditional’ volunteering, where spreadsheets and mini-databases might be used to supplement the main catalogue. The need for import and export processes to manage volunteer data can intentionally or unintentionally create a barrier to more closely integrating different sources of authoritative information.

So authority might be shared – but when it counts, whose information is regarded as vital, as 'core', and integrated into long-term systems, and whose is left out?

I realised that for me, at heart it’s about digital preservation. If it's not in an organisation’s digital preservation plans, or content is with an organisation that isn't supported in having a digital preservation plan; is it really valued? And if content isn't valued, is authority really shared?

Diagram showing an 'onion' of data from 'core metadata' at the centre to 'additional metadata' (with arrows marked 'community content' and 'algorithmic content' pointing to it, to 'public programmes' to 'unmediated public access'

Talk notes for #AIUK on the British Library and crowdsourcing

I had a strict five minute slot for my talk in the panel on 'Reimagining the past with AI' at Turing's AI UK event today, so wrote out my notes and thought I might as well share them…

The panel blurb was 'The past shapes the present and influences the future, but the historical record isn’t straightforward, and neither are its digital representations. Join the AHRC project Living with Machines and friends on their journey to reimagine the past through AI and data science and the challenges and opportunities within.' It was a delight to chat with Dave Beavan, Mariona Coll Ardanuy, Melodee Wood and Tim Hitchcock.

My prepared talk: A bit about the British Library for those who aren't familiar with it. It's one of the two biggest libraries in the world, and it’s the national library for the UK. 
 
Its collections are vast – somewhere between 180 and 200 million collection items, including 14 million books; hundreds of terrabytes of archived websites; over 600,000 bound volumes of historical newspapers, of which about 60 million pages have been digitised with partners FindMyPast so far)… 
 
We've been working with crowdsourcing – which we defined as working with the public on tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge – for about a decade now. We've collected local sounds and accents around Britain, georeferenced gorgeous historical maps, matched card catalogue records in Urdu and Chinese to digital catalogue records, and brought the history of theatre across the UK to life via old playbills. 
 
Some of our crowdsourcing work is designed to help improve the discoverability of cultural heritage collections, and some, like our work with Living with Machines, is designed to build datasets to help answer wider research questions. 
 
In all cases, our work with crowdsourcing is closely aligned with the BL's mission: it helps make our shared intellectual heritage available for research, inspiration and enjoyment. 
 
We think of crowdsourcing activities as a form of digital volunteering, where participation in the task is rewarding in its own right. Our crowdsourcing projects are a platform for privileged access and deeper engagement with our digitised collections. They're an avenue for people who wouldn't normally encounter historical records close up to work with them, while helping make those items easier for others to access.
 
Through Living with Machines, we've worked out how to design tasks that fit into computational linguistic research questions and timelines… 
 
So that's all great – but… the scale of our collections is hard to ignore. Individual crowdsourcing tasks that make items more accessible by transcribing or classifying items are beyond the capacity of even the keenest crowd. Enter machine learning, human computation, human in the loop… 
 
While we're keen to start building systems that combine machine learning and human input to help scale up our work, we don't want to buy into terms like 'crowdworkers' or ‘gig work’ that we see in some academic and commercial work. If crowdsourcing is a form of public engagement, as well as a productive platform for tasks, we can't think of our volunteers as 'cogs' in a system. 
 
We think that it's important to help shape the future of 'human computation' systems; to ensure that work on machine learning / AI are in alignment with Library values . We look to work that peers at the Library of Congress are doing to create human-in-the-loop systems that 'cultivate responsible practices'. 
 
We want to retain the opportunities for the public to get started with simpler tasks based on historical collections, while also being careful not to 'waste clicks' by having people do tasks that computers can do faster. 
 
With Living with Machines, we've built tasks that provide opportunities for participants to think about how their classifications form training datasets for machine learning. 
 
So my questions for the next year are: how can we design human computation systems that help participants acquire new literacies and skills, while scaling up and amplifying their work?

Screenshot of Zoom view from the conference stage with a large green clock and red countdown timer
The conference 'backstage' view on Zoom

Introducing… The Collective Wisdom Handbook

I'm delighted to share my latest publication, a collaboration with 15 co-authors written in March and April 2021. It's the major output of my Collective Wisdom project, an AHRC-funded project I lead with Meghan Ferriter and Sam Blickhan.

Until August 9, 2021, you can provide feedback or comment on The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage:

We have published this first version of our collaborative text to provide early access to our work, and to invite comment and discussion from anyone interested in crowdsourcing, citizen science, citizen history, digital / online volunteer projects, programmes, tools or platforms with cultural heritage collections.

I wrote two posts to provide further context:

Our book is now open for 'community review'. What does that mean for you?

Announcing an 'early access' version of our Collective Wisdom Handbook

I'm curious to see how much of a difference this period of open comment makes. The comments so far have been quite specific and useful, but I'd like to know where we *really* got it right, and where we could include other examples. You need a pubpub account to comment but after that it's pretty straightforward – select text, and add a comment, or comment on an entire chapter.

Having some distance from the original writing period has been useful for me – not least, the realisation that the title should have been 'perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and digital humanities'.

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.

References for Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage: a practical guide to designing and running successful projects

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Bedford, A. (2014, February 16). Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps. Retrieved 12 September 2014, from Nielsen Norman Group website: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-instructional-overlay/

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Bernstein, S. (2014). Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn. In M. Ridge (Ed.), Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage. Retrieved from http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410221

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Brumfield, B. W. (2012b, March 17). Crowdsourcing at IMLS WebWise 2012. Retrieved 8 September 2014, from Collaborative Manuscript Transcription website: http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/crowdsourcing-at-imls-webwise-2012.html

Budiu, R. (2014, March 2). Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks. Retrieved 7 March 2014, from Nielsen Norman Group website: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/

Causer, T., & Terras, M. (2014). ‘Many Hands Make Light Work. Many Hands Together Make Merry Work’: Transcribe Bentham and Crowdsourcing Manuscript Collections. In M. Ridge (Ed.), Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage. Retrieved from http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472410221

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Collings, R. (2015, February 1). The art of computer recognition. Retrieved 22 October 2018, from Art UK website: https://artuk.org/about/blog/the-art-of-computer-recognition

Crowdsourcing Consortium. (2015). Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines. Retrieved from http://crowdconsortium.org/

Crowley, E. J., & Zisserman, A. (2016). The Art of Detection. Presented at the Workshop on Computer Vision for Art Analysis, ECCV. Retrieved from https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2016/Crowley16/crowley16.pdf

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Hermanson, K. (1995). Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why Does One Want to Learn? In J. Falk & L. D. Dierking (Eds.), Public institutions for personal learning: Establishing a research agenda (pp. 66–77). Washington D.C.: American Association of Museums.

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What big topics in Digital Humanities should a reading group discuss in 2021?

This is a thrown-together post to capture responses to a question I asked on twitter last week. The Digital Scholarship Reading Group I run at the British Library will spend the first meeting of 2021 collaboratively planning topics to discuss in the rest of the year, so to broaden my understanding of what might be discussed, I posted, 'A question for people interested / working in Digital Humanities – what do you think are the big topics for 2021? Or what's not, but should be a focus? … New publications or conference papers welcome!'.

And since I was asking people for suggestions, it seemed like the right time to share something we'd been thinking about for a while: 'we've decided to open our discussions to people outside the British Library / Turing Institute! We'll alternate between 11am-12pm and 3-4pm meeting times on the first Tuesday of each month'. I haven't sorted the logistics for signing up – should it be on a session by session basis, or should we just add people's email address to the generic meeting request so they get the updates? (Will they get the updates, given how defensive and awful email is for collaboration these days?)

I also posted links: 'For context, here's what we read up to early 2018 What do deep learning, community archives, Livy and the politics of artefacts have in common? and a themed summary, Readings at the intersection of digital scholarship and anti-racism.

Responses to date are below. I didn't want to faff about with embedded tweets because they're more likely to break over time, so I've just indented replies with the username at the start.

Claire Boardman @boardman_claire The environmental impact of DH? Conversational AI and collections?

Jajwalya Karajgikar @JajRK Large language models, and computational text analysis overall?

                @mia_out As in models that use very large amounts of training data? And yes, we should do more on CTA, I think we could probably get broader coverage of methods, thanks for the prompt!

                Jajwalya Karajgikar @JajRK Models that use deep learning for language prediction; GPT-3 I think someone mentioned on the thread already?

Thomas Padilla @thomasgpadilla Social justice and DH – though all work that frames current strife as a new thing vs. a longstanding pervasive reality should be tossed into an abyss to make way for others

                @mia_out I won't ask you to name and shame bad pieces, but let me know if you have any favs that do it well!

Thomas Padilla @thomasgpadilla Ha! On the collections side @dorothyjberry  has a piece or two brewing.  @ess_ell_zee  work here is good too I think https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/14667

                @artepublico peeps like @gbaezaventura and @rayenchil and the @MellonFdn supported Latinx DH program are good places to look

                Same goes for @profgabrielle and all the @CCP_org  work is fantastic

Wilhelmina Randtke @randtke Long term sustained funding. Acknowledging, and even compiling a list of, projects that have had resources eliminated or been completely discontinued since March.

                Jenny Fewster @Fewster Absolutely! This is a problem internationally. Dig hums projects set up with one off funding that then aren’t sustained. Unfortunately digital projects are not a “set and forget” prospect. It’s a colossal waste of time, effort, knowledge and money

Matthew Hannah @TinkeringHuman I think we need/will see more work about the limits of neoliberal capitalism, the academy, and DH, applications of critical university studies and Marxist theory. Esp as higher ed continues to implode.

                @mia_out Sounds very timely! I don't suppose you have any papers or presentations in mind?

                Matthew Hannah @TinkeringHuman Claire Potter’s piece in Radical Teacher is also an inspiration: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3c0/b0f853710a56b13b0d232b3b435a19bf59a7.pdf

                But we need more engagement I think around the question of precarity and economics imo

                See also: https://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-publication-precarious-labor-in-the-digital-humanities-american-quarterly-70-3/

Johan Oomen @johanoomen Detecting polyvocality in heritage collections and navigating this underexplored dimension to investigate shifting viewpoints over time. Could also be a great opportinity for crowdsourcing projects, to encourage contemporary users to voice their opinions on contentious topics.

                @mia_out Ooh, that's a really juicy one – lots of potential and lots of pitfalls

Erik Champion @nzerik The influence of social media on politics? The failure of social media apps, webchat etc to compensate for lockdown distancing? Govt and corp control on personal data? Big companies controlling VR devices and personal +physiological data?

                @mia_out As seen recently when people were annoyed they had to do a Google Recaptcha on a COVID test site

                Erik Champion @nzerik Bots need vaccines too! (Equality for bots trojans and spam machines #101)

Alexander Doria @Dorialexander On the technical side, optical manuscript recognition and layout analysis (especially for newspaper archives): mature tools are just emerging and that can change a lot in terms of corpus availability, research directions and digitization choices.

                @mia_out There is so much interesting work on newspapers right now! It feels like scholarship is going to have a quite different starting point in just a few years. Periodicals less so, maybe because they're more specialised and less (family history) name rich?

                Alexander Doria @Dorialexander Yes that's true. Perhaps also because they are less challenging both technically and intellectually (it's not that much of a stretch to go from book studies to the periodicals).

Alexander Doria @Dorialexander (On the social side I would say there is a long overdue uncomfortable discussion about the reliance of the field to diverse forms of digital labors: from the production of digitized archives in developing countries to the large use of students as a cheap/unpaid labor force)

                @mia_out That ties in with ideas from @TinkeringHuman

Max Kemman @MaxKemman I think we'll be seeing more about Computational Humanities and how it relates to Digital Humanities, for which a good starting point will be the @CompHumResearch conference proceedings http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2723/

                @mia_out Ooh, we could have a debate or discussion about the difference!

                Lauren Tilton @nolauren And intersection/ difference from Data Science

                @mia_out Good call, the lines are becoming increasingly blurred, hopefully in more good ways than bad

Gabriel Hankins @GabrielHankins GPT-3 and algorithmic composition. Interested in the conversation if you open it!

And finally, one reason I collected these responses was:

Michael Lascarides @mlascarides A feature I wish Twitter had: When I see someone influential in a domain I'm interested in ask a really great question, I want to bookmark that question to return to in a couple of days once the responses have come in. It's a use case a bit more specific than a "like".

                Michael Lascarides @mlascarides Inspired most recently by [my] Q, but it comes up about once a week for me

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.

Stuck at home? View cultural heritage collections online

With people self-isolating to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents and educators (as well as people looking for an art or history fix) may be looking to replace in-person trips to galleries, libraries, archives and museums* with online access to images of artefacts and information about them. GLAMs have spent decades getting some of the collections digitised and online so that you can view items and information from home.

* Collectively known as 'GLAMs' because it's a mouthful to say each time

Search a bunch of GLAM portals at once

I've made a quick 'custom search engine' so you can search most of the sites above with one Google search box. Search a range of portals that collect digitised objects, texts and media from galleries, libraries, archives and museums internationally:

The direct link is https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=006190492493219194770:xw0b7dfwb6b (it's just a search box, without any context, but it means you can do a search without loading this whole post)

Collections, deep zoom and virtual tour portals

Various platforms have large collections of objects from different institutions, in formats ranging from 'virtual exhibitions' or 'tours' to 'deep zooms' to catalogue-style pages about objects. I've focused on sites that include collections from multiple institutions, but this also means some of them are huge and you'll have to explore a bit to find relevant content. Try:

Other links

Various articles have collected institution-specific links to different forms of virtual tours. Try:

Things are moving fast, so let me know about other sets of links to collections, stories and tours online that'll help people staying home get their fix of history and culture and I'll update this post. Comment below, email me or @mia_out on twitter.

Screenshot from https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en
Europeana is just one of many online portals to images, stories, deep zooms and virtual tours / exhibitions from galleries, libraries, archives and museums internationally