Looking for (crowdsourcing) love in all the right places

One of the most important exercises in the crowdsourcing workshops I run is the 'speed dating' session. The idea is to spend some time looking at a bunch of crowdsourcing projects until you find a project you love. Finding a project you enjoy gives you a deeper insight into why other people participate in crowdsourcing, and will see you through the work required to get a crowdsourcing project going. I think making a personal connection like this helps reduce some of the cynicism I occasionally encounter about why people would volunteer their time to help cultural heritage collections. Trying lots of projects also gives you a much better sense of the types of barriers projects can accidentally put in the way of participation. It's also a good reminder that everyone is a nerd about something, and that there's a community of passion for every topic you can think of.

If you want to learn more about designing history or cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects, trying out lots of project is a great place to start. The more time you can spend on this the better – an hour is ideal – but trying just one or two projects is better than nothing. In a workshop I get people to note how a project made them feel – what they liked most and least about a project, and who they'd recommend it to. You can also note the input and output types to help build your mental database of relevant crowdsourcing projects.

The list of projects I suggest varies according to the background of workshop participants, and I'll often throw in suggestions tailored to specific interests, but here's a generic list to get you started.

10 Most Wanted http://10most.org.uk/	Research object histories
Ancient Lives http://ancientlives.org/	Humanities, language, text transcription
British Library Georeferencer http://www.bl.uk/maps/	Locating and georeferencing maps (warning: if it's running, only hard maps may be left!)
Children of the Lodz Ghetto http://online.ushmm.org/lodzchildren/	Citizen history, research
Describe Me http://describeme.museumvictoria.com.au/	Describe objects
DIY History http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/	Transcribe historical letters, recipes, diaries
Family History Transcription Project http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibrarync/collections/	Document transcription (Flickr/Yahoo login required to comment)
Herbaria@home http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/ (for bonus points, compare it with Notes from Nature https://www.zooniverse.org/project/notes_from_nature)	Transcribing specimen sheets (or biographical research)
HistoryPin Year of the Bay 'Mysteries' https://www.historypin.org/attach/project/22-yearofthebay/mysteries/index/	Help find dates, locations, titles for historic photographs; overlay images on StreetView
iSpot http://www.ispotnature.org/	Help 'identify wildlife and share nature'
Letters of 1916 http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/	Transcribe letters and/or contribute letters
London Street Views 1840 http://crowd.museumoflondon.org.uk/lsv1840/	Help transcribe London business directories
Micropasts http://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/app/photomasking/newtask	Photo-masking to help produce 3D objects; also structured transcription
Museum Metadata Games: Dora http://museumgam.es/dora/	Tagging game with cultural heritage objects (my prototype from 2010)
NYPL Building Inspector http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/	A range of tasks, including checking building footprints, entering addresses
Operation War Diary http://operationwardiary.org/	Structured transcription of WWI unit diaries
Papers of the War Department http://wardepartmentpapers.org/	Document transcription
Planet Hunters http://planethunters.org/	Citizen science; review visualised data
Powerhouse Museum Collection Search http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/menu.php	Tagging objects
Reading Experience Database http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/	Text selection, transcription, description.
Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center https://transcription.si.edu/	Text transcription
Tiltfactor Metadata Games http://www.metadatagames.org/	Games with cultural heritage images
Transcribe Bentham http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/	History; text transcription
Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper?q=	Correct OCR errors, transcribe text, tag or describe documents
US National Archives http://www.amara.org/en/teams/national-archives/	Transcribing videos
What's the Score at the Bodleian http://www.whats-the-score.org/	Music and text transcription, description
What's on the menu http://menus.nypl.org/	Structured transcription of restaurant menus
What's on the menu? Geotagger http://menusgeo.herokuapp.com/	Geolocating historic restaurant menus
Wikisource – random item link http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Random/Index	Transcribing texts
Worm Watch http://www.wormwatchlab.org	Citizen science; video
Your Paintings Tagger http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/	Paintings; free-text or structured tagging

NB: crowdsourcing is a dynamic field, some sites may be temporarily out of content or have otherwise settled in transit. Some sites require registration, so you may need to find another site to explore while you're waiting for your registration email.

In which I am awed by the generosity of others, and have some worthy goals

A quick update from my CENDARI fellowship working on a project that's becoming 'In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War'. I've spent the week reading (again a mixture of original diaries and letters, technical stuff like ontology documentation and also WWI history forums and 'amateur' sites) and writing. I put together a document outlining a rang of possible goals and some very sketchy tech specs, and opened it up for feedback. The goals I set out are copied below for those who don't want to delve into detail. The commentable document, 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions goes into more detail.

However, the main point of this post is to publicly thank those who've helped by commenting and sharing on the doc, on twitter or via email. Hopefully I'm not forgetting anyone, as I've been blown away by and am incredibly grateful for the generosity of those who've taken the time to at least skim 1600 words (!). It's all helped me clarify my ideas and find solutions I'm able to start implementing next week. In no order at all – at CENDARI, Jennifer Edmond, Alex O'Connor, David Stuart, Benjamin Štular, Francesca Morselli, Deirdre Byrne; online Andrew Gray @generalising; Alex Stinson @ DHKState; jason webber @jasonmarkwebber; Alastair Dunning @alastairdunning; Ben Brumfield @benwbrum; Christine Pittsley; Owen Stephens @ostephens; David Haskiya @DavidHaskiya; Jeremy Ottevanger @jottevanger; Monika Lechner @lemondesign; Gavin Robinson ‏@merozcursed; Tom Pert @trompet2 – thank you all!

Worthy goals (i.e. things I'm hoping to accomplish, with the help of historians and the public; only some of which I'll manage in the time)

At the end of this project, someone who wants to research a soldier in WWI but doesn't know a thing about how armies were structured should be able to find a personal narrative from a soldier in the same bit of the army, to help them understand experiences of the Great War.

Hopefully these personal accounts will provide some context, in their own words, for the lived experiences of WWI. Some goals listed are behind-the-scenes stuff that should just invisibly make personal diaries, letters and memoirs more easily discoverable. It needs datasets that provide structures that support relationships between people and documents; participatory interfaces for creating or enhancing information about contemporary materials (which feed into those supporting structures), and interfaces that use the data created.

More specifically, my goals include:

A personal account by someone in each unit linked to that unit's record, so that anyone researching a WWI name would have at least one account to read. To populate this dataset, personal accounts (diaries, letters, etc) would need to be linked to specific soldiers, who can then be linked to specific units. Linking published accounts such as official unit histories would be a bonus. [Semantic MediaWiki]
Researched links between individual men and the units they served in, to allow their personal accounts to be linked to the relevant military unit. I'm hoping I can find historians willing to help with the process of finding and confirming the military unit the writer was in. [Semantic MediaWiki]
A platform for crowdsourcing the transcription and annotation of digitised documents. The catch is that the documents for transcription would be held remotely on a range of large and small sites, from Europeana's collection to library sites that contain just one or two digitised diaries. Documents could be tagged/annotated with the names of people, places, events, or concepts represented in them. [Semantic MediaWiki??]
A structured dataset populated with the military hierarchy (probably based on The British order of battle of 1914-1918) that records the start and end dates of each parent-child relationship (an example of how much units moved within the hierarchy)
A published webpage for each unit, to hold those links to official and personal documents about that unit in WWI. In future this page could include maps, timelines and other visualisations tailored to the attributes of a unit, possibly including theatres of war, events, campaigns, battles, number of privates and officers, etc. (Possibly related to CENDARI Work Package 9?) [Semantic MediaWiki]
A better understanding of what people want to know at different stages of researching WWI histories. This might include formal data gathering, possibly a combination of interviews, forum discussions or survey

Goals that are more likely to drop off, or become quick experiments to see how far you can get with accessible tools:

Trained 'named entity recognition' and 'natural language processing' tools that could be run over transcribed text to suggest possible people, places, events, concepts, etc [this might drop off the list as the CENDARI project is working on a tool called Pineapple (PDF poster). That said, I'll probably still experiment with the Stanford NER tool to see what the results are like]
A way of presenting possible matches from the text tools above for verification or correction by researchers. Ideally, this would be tied in with the ability to annotate documents
The ability to search across different repositories for a particular soldier, to help with the above.

Commentable version: 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions.

Linking lived experiences of WWI through battalions?

Another update from my CENDARI Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, looking at 'In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War', which is a small-scale, short-term pilot based on WWI collections. My first post is Defining the scope: week one as a CENDARI Fellow. Over the past two weeks I've done a lot of reading – more WWI diaries and letters; WWI histories and historiography; specialist information like military structures (orders of battle, etc). I've also sketched out lots of snippets of possible functions, data, relationships and other outcomes.

I've narrowed the key goal (or minimum viable product, if you prefer) of my project to linking personal accounts of the war – letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, etc – to battalions, by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit. Once these personal accounts are linked to particular military units, they can be linked to higher units – from the battalion, ship or regiment to brigade, corps, etc – and to particular places, activities, events and campaigns. The idea behind this is to provide context for an individual's experience of WWI by linking to narratives written by people in the same situation. I'm still working out how to organise the research process of matching the right soldier to the right battalion/regiment/ship so that relevant personal stories are discoverable. I'm also still working out which attributes of a battalion are relevant, how granular the data will be, and how to design for the inevitable variation in data quality (for example, the availability of records for different armies varies hugely). Finally, I’m still working out which bits need computer science tools and which need the help of other historians.

Given the number of centenary projects, I was hoping to find more structured data about WWI entities. Trenches to Triples would be useful source of permanent URLs, and terms to train named entity recognition, but am I missing other sources?

There's a lot of content, and so much activity around WWI records, but it's spread out across the internet. Individual people and small organisations are digitising and transcribing diaries and letters. Big collecting projects like Europeana have lots of personal accounts, but they're often not transcribed and they don't seem to be linked to structured data about the item itself. Some people have painstakingly transcribed unit diaries, but they're not linked from the official site, so others wouldn't know there's a more easily read version of the diary available. I've been wondering if you could crowdsource the process of transcribing records held elsewhere, and offer the transcripts back to sites. Using dedicated transcription software would let others suggest corrections, and might also make it possible to link sections of the text to external 'entities' like names, places, events and concepts.

Albert Henry Bailey. Image:
Sir George Grey Special Collections,
Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19150909-39-5

To help figure out the issues researchers face and the variations in available resources, I'm researching randomly selected soldiers from different Allied forces. I've posted my notes on Private Albert Henry Bailey, service number 13/970a. You'll see that they're in prose form, and don't contain any structured data. Most of my research used digitised-but-not-transcribed images of documents, with some transcribed accounts. It would definitely benefit from deeper knowledge of military history – for a start, which battalions were in the same place as his unit at the same time?

This account of the arrival and first weeks of the Auckland Mount Rifles at Gallipoli from the official unit history gives a sense of the density and specificity of local place names, as does the official unit diary, and I assume many personal accounts. I'm not sure how named entity recognition tools will cope, and ideally I'd like to find lists of places to 'train' the tools (including possibly some from the 'Trenches to Triples' project).

If there aren't already any structured data sources for military hierarchies in WWI, do I have to make one? And if so, how? The idea would be to turn prose descriptions like this Australian War Memorial history of the 27th AIF Battalion, this order of battle of the 2nd Australian Division and any other suitable sources into structured data. I can see some ways it might be possible to crowdsource the task, but it's a big task. But it's worth it – providing a service that lets people look up which higher military units, places. activities and campaigns a particular battalion/regiment/ship was linked to at a given time would be a good legacy for my research.

I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of things, and my list of questions is longer than my list of answers, but I should end here. To close, I want to share a quote from the official history of the Auckland Mounted Rifles. The author said he 'would like to speak of the splendid men of the rank and file who died during this three months' struggle. Many names rush to the memory, but it is not possible to mention some without doing an injustice to the memory of others'. I guess my project is driven by a vision of doing justice to the memory of every soldier, particularly those ordinary men who aren't as easily found in the records. I'm hoping that drawing on the work of other historians and re-linking disparate sources will help provide as much context as possible for their experiences of the First World War.

—
Update, 15 October 2014: if you've made it this far, you might also be interested in chipping in at 'Linking lived experiences of the First World War': possible goals and a bunch of technical questions.

It's here! Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage is now available

My edited volume, Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, is now available! My introduction (Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage: Introduction), which provides an overview of the field and outlines the contribution of the 12 chapters, is online at Ashgate's site, along with the table of contents and index. There's a 10% discount if you order online.

If you're in London on the evening of Thursday 20th November, we're celebrating with a book launch party at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Register at http://crowdsourcingculturalheritage.eventbrite.co.uk.

Here's the back page blurb: "Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves.

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their ‘crowd’. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results.

This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives."

Massive thanks to the following authors of chapters for their intellectual generosity and their patience with up to five rounds of edits, plus proofing, indexing and more…

Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn, Shelley Bernstein;
Old Weather: approaching collections from a different angle, Lucinda Blaser;
‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work’: Transcribe Bentham and crowdsourcing manuscript collections, Tim Causer and Melissa Terras;
Build, analyse and generalise: community transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the development of Scripto, Sharon M. Leon;
What's on the menu?: crowdsourcing at the New York Public Library, Michael Lascarides and Ben Vershbow;
What’s Welsh for ‘crowdsourcing’? Citizen science and community engagement at the National Library of Wales, Lyn Lewis Dafis, Lorna M. Hughes and Rhian James;
Waisda?: making videos findable through crowdsourced annotations, Johan Oomen, Riste Gligorov and Michiel Hildebrand;
Your Paintings Tagger: crowdsourcing descriptive metadata for a national virtual collection, Kathryn Eccles and Andrew Greg.
Crowdsourcing: Crowding out the archivist? Locating crowdsourcing within the broader landscape of participatory archives, Alexandra Eveleigh;
How the crowd can surprise us: humanities crowdsourcing and the creation of knowledge, Stuart Dunn and Mark Hedges;
The role of open authority in a collaborative web, Lori Byrd Phillips;
Making crowdsourcing compatible with the missions and values of cultural heritage organisations, Trevor Owens.

Defining the scope: week one as a CENDARI Fellow

I'm coming to the end of my first week as a Transnational Access Fellow with the CENDARI project at the Trinity College Dublin Long Room Hub. CENDARI 'aims to leverage innovative technologies to provide historians with the tools by which to contextualise, customise and share their research', which dovetails with my PhD research incredibly well. This Fellowship gives me an opportunity to extend my ideas about 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons' without trying to squish them into a history thesis, and is probably perfectly timed in giving me a break from writing up.

View over Trinity College Dublin

There are two parts to my CENDARI project 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'. The first involves working on the technical, data and cultural context/requirements for the 'participatory history commons' as an infrastructure; the second is a demonstrator based on that infrastructure. I'll be working out how official records and 'shoebox archives' can be mined and indexed to help provide what I'm calling 'computationally-generated context' for people researching lives touched by World War One.

This week I've read metadata schema (MODS extended with TEI and a local schema, if you're interested) and ontology guidelines, attended some lively seminars on Irish history, gotten my head around CENDARI's work packages and the structure of the British army during WWI. I've started a list of nearby local history societies with active research projects to see if I can find some working on WWI history – I'd love to work with people who have sources they want to digitise and generally do more with, and people who are actively doing research on First World War lives. I've started to read sample primary materials and collect machine-readable sources so I can test out approaches by manually marking-up and linking different repositories of records. I'm going to spend the rest of the day tidying up my list of outcomes and deliverables and sketching out how all the different aspects of my project fit together. And tonight I'm going to check out some of the events at Discover Research Dublin. Nerd joy!

'The cooperative archive'?

Finally, I've dealt with something I'd put off for ages. 'Commons' is one of those tricky words that's less resonant than it could be, so I looked for a better name than the 'participatory history commons'. because 'commons' is one of those tricky words that's less resonant than it could be. I doodled around words like collation, congeries, cluster, demos, assemblage, sources, commons, active, engaged, participatory, opus, archive, digital, posse, mob, cahoots and phrases like collaborative collections, collaborative history, history cooperative, but eventually settled on 'cooperative archive'. This appeals because 'cooperative' encompasses attitudes or values around working together for a common purpose, and it includes those who share records and those who actively work to enhance and contextualise them. 'Archive' suggests primary sources, and can be applied to informal collections of 'shoebox archives' and the official holdings of museums, libraries and archives.

What do you think – does 'cooperative archive' work for you? Does your first reaction to the name evoke anything like my thoughts above?

Update, October 11: following some market testing on Facebook, it seems 'collaborative collections' best describes my vision.

Who loves your stuff? How to collect links to your site

If you've ever wondered who's using content from your site or what people find interesting, here are some ways to find out, using the Design Museum's URL as an example.

'Links to your site' via Google Webmaster Tools https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/55281

Reddit – plug your URL in after /domain/
http://www.reddit.com/domain/designmuseum.org

Wikipedia – plug your URL in after target=
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=*.designmuseum.org
Depending on your topic coverage you may want to look at other language Wikipedias.

Pinterest – plug your URL in after /source/
http://www.pinterest.com/source/designmuseum.org/

Twitter – search for the URL with quotes around it e.g. "designmuseum.org"

If you can see one particular page shooting up in your web stats, you could try a reverse image search on TinEye to see where it's being referenced.

What am I missing? I'd love to hear about similar links and methods for other sites – tell me in the comments or on twitter @mia_out.

Update: in a similar vein, Tim Sherratt @wragge launched a new experiment called Trove Traces the same day, to 'explore how Trove newspapers are used' by listing pages that link to articles: http://trovespace.webfactional.com/traces/

Update 2: Desi Gonzalez ‏@desigonz tried out some of these techniques and put together a great post on 'Thoughts on what museums can learn from Reddit, Yelp, and what @briandroitcour calls vernacular criticism'
You might also be interested in: Can you capture visitors with a steampunk arm?

How can we connect museum technologists with their history?

A quick post triggered by an article on the role of domain knowledge (knowledge of a field) in critical thinking, Deep in thought:

Domain knowledge is so important because of the way our memories work. When we think, we use both working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is the space where we take in new information from our environment; everything we are consciously thinking about is held there. Long-term memory is the store of knowledge that we can call up into working memory when we need it. Working memory is limited, whereas long-term memory is vast. Sometimes we look as if we are using working memory to reason, when actually we are using long-term memory to recall. Even incredibly complex tasks that seem as if they must involve working memory can depend largely on long-term memory.

When we are using working memory to progress through a new problem, the knowledge stored in long-term memory will make that process far more efficient and successful. … The more parts of the problem that we can automate and store in long-term memory, the more space we will have available in working memory to deal with the new parts of the problem.

A few years ago I defined a 'museum technologist' as 'someone who can appropriately apply a range of digital solutions to help meet the goals of a particular museum project', and deep domain knowledge clearly has a role to play in this (also in the kinds of critical thinking that will save technologists from being unthinking cheerleaders for the newest buzzword or geek toy).

There's a long history of hard-won wisdom, design patterns and knowledge (whether about ways not to tender for or specify software, reasons why proposed standards may or may not work, translating digital methods and timelines for departments raised on print, etc – I'm sure you all have examples) contained in the individual and collective memory of individual technologists and teams. Some of it is represented in museum technology mailing lists, blogs or conference proceedings, but the lessons learnt in the past aren't always easily discoverable by people encountering digital heritage issues for the first time. And then there's the issue of working out which knowledge relates to specific, outdated technologies and which still holds while not quashing the enthusiasm of new people with a curt 'we tried that before'…

Something in the juxtaposition of the 20th anniversary of BritPop and the annual wave of enthusiasm and discovery from the international Museums and the Web (#MW2014) conference prompted me to look at what the Museums Computer Group (MCG) and Museum Computer Network (MCN) lists were talking about in April five and ten years ago (i.e. in easily-accessible archives):

Five years ago in #musetech – open web, content distribution, virtualisation, wifi https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind0904&L=mcg&X=498A43516F310B2193 http://mcn.edu/pipermail/mcn-l/2009-April/date.html

Ten years ago in #musetech people were talking about knowledge organisation and video links with schools https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind04&L=mcg&F=&S=&X=498A43516F310B2193

Some of the conversations from that random sample are still highly relevant today, and more focused dives into various archives would probably find approaches and information that'd help people tackling current issues.

So how can we help people new to the sector find those previous conversations and get some of this long-term memory into their own working memory? Pointing people to search forms for the MCG and MCN lists is easy, some of the conference proceedings are a bit trickier (e.g. search within the museumsandtheweb.com) and there's no central list of museum technology blogs that I know of. Maybe people could nominate blog posts they think stand the test of time, mindful of the risk of it turning into a popularity/recency thing?

If you're new(ish) to digital heritage, how did you find your feet? Which sites or communities helped you, and how did you find them? Or if you have a new team member, how do you help them get up to speed with museum technology? Or looking further afield, which resources would you send to someone from academia or related heritage fields who wanted to learn about building heritage resources for or with specialists and the public?

Sharing is caring keynote 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons'

Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons platform: a provocation about collaborating with users

Mia Ridge, Open University Contact me: @mia_out or https://miaridge.com/

[I was invited to Copenhagen to talk about my research on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage at the 3rd international Sharing is Caring seminar on April 1. I'm sharing my notes in advance to make life easier for those awesome people following along in a second or third language, particularly since I'm delivering my talk via video.]

Today I'd like to present both a proposal for something called the 'Participatory Commons', and a provocation (or conversation starter): there's a paradox in our hopes for deeper audience engagement through crowdsourcing: projects that don't grow with their participants will lose them as they develop new skills and interests and move on. This talk presents some options for dealing with this paradox and suggests a Participatory Commons provides a way to take a sector-wide view of active engagement with heritage content and redefine our sense of what it means when everybody wins.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this – I'll be following the hashtag during the session and my contact details are above.

Before diving in, I wanted to reflect on some lessons from my work in museums on public engagement and participation.

My philosophy for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage (aka what I've learnt from making crowdsourcing games)

One thing I learnt over the past years: museums can be intimidating places. When we ask for help with things like tagging or describing our collections, people want to help but they worry about getting it wrong and looking stupid or about harming the museum.

The best technology in the world won't solve a single problem unless it's empathically designed and accompanied by social solutions. This isn't a talk about technology, it's a talk about people – what they want, what they're afraid of, how we can overcome all that to collaborate and work together.

Dora's Lost Data

So a few years ago I explored the potential of crowdsourcing games to make helping a museum less scary and more fun. In this game, 'Dora's Lost Data', players meet a junior curator who asks them to tag objects so they'll be findable in Google. Games aren't the answer to everything, but identifying barriers to participation is always important. You have to understand your audiences – their motivations for starting and continuing to participate; the fears, anxieties, uncertainties that prevent them participating. [My games were hacked together outside of work hours, more information is available at My MSc dissertation: crowdsourcing games for museums; if you'd like to see more polished metadata games check out Tiltfactor's http://www.metadatagames.org/#games]

Mutual wins – everybody's happy

My definition of crowdsourcing: cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects ask the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically, in an environment where the activities, goals (or both) provide inherent rewards for participation, and where their participation contributes to a shared, significant goal or research area.

It helps to think of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as a form of volunteering. Participation has to be rewarding for everyone involved. That sounds simple, but focusing on the audiences' needs can be difficult when there are so many organisational needs competing for priority and limited resources for polishing the user experience. Further, as many projects discover, participant needs change over time…

What is a Participatory Commons and why would we want one?

First, I have to introduce you to some people. These are composite stories (personas) based on my research…

Two archival historians, Simone and Andre. Simone travels to archives in her semester breaks to stock up on research material, taking photos of most documents 'in case they're useful later', transcribing key text from others. Andre is often at the next table, also looking for material for his research. The documents he collected for his last research project would be useful for Simone's current book but they've never met and he has no way of sharing that part of his 'personal research collection' with her. Currently, each of these highly skilled researchers take their cumulative knowledge away with them at the end of the day, leaving no trace of their work in the archive itself. Next…

Two people from a nearby village, Martha and Bob. They joined their local history society when they retired and moved to the village. They're helping find out what happened to children from the village school's class of 1898 in the lead-up to and during World War I. They are using census returns and other online documents to add records to a database the society's secretary set up in Excel. Meanwhile…

A family historian, Daniel. He has a classic 'shoebox archive' – a box containing his grandmother Sarah's letters and diary, describing her travels and everyday life at the turn of the century. He's transcribing them and wants to put them online to share with his extended family. One day he wants to make a map for his kids that shows all the places their great-grandmother lived and visited. Finally, there's…

Crowdsourcer Nisha.She has two young kids and works for a local authority. She enjoys playing games like Candy Crush on her mobile, and after the kids have gone to bed she transcribes ship logs on the Old Weather website while watching TV with her husband. She finds it relaxing, feels good about contributing to science and enjoys the glimpses of life at sea. Sites like Old Weather use 'microtasks' – tiny, easily accomplished tasks – and crowdsourcing to digitise large amounts of text.

Helping each other?

None of our friends above know it, but they're all looking at material from roughly the same time and place. Andre and Simone could help each other by sharing the documents they've collected over the years. Sarah's diaries include the names of many children from her village that would help Martha and Bob's project, and Nisha could help everyone if she transcribed sections of Sarah's diary.

Connecting everyone's efforts for the greater good: Participatory Commons

This image shows the two main aspects of the Participatory Commons: the different sources for content, and the activities that people can do with that content.

The Participatory Commons (image: Mia Ridge)

The Participatory Commons is a platform where content from different sources can be aggregated. Access to shared resources underlies the idea of the 'Commons', particularly material that is not currently suitable for sites like Europeana, like 'shoebox archives' and historians' personal record collections. So if the 'Commons' part refers to shared resources, how is it participatory?

The Participatory Commons interface supports a range of activities, from the types of tasks historians typically do, like assessing and contextualising documents, activities that specialists or the public can do like identifying particular people, places, events or things in sources, or typical crowdsourcing tasks like fulltext transcription or structured tagging.

By combining the energy of crowdsourcing with the knowledge historians create on a platform that can store or link to primary sources from museums, libraries and archives with 'shoebox archives', the Commons could help make our shared heritage more accessible to all. As a platform that makes material about ordinary people available alongside official archives and as an interface for enjoyable, meaningful participation in heritage work, the Commons could be a basis for 'open source history', redressing some of the absences in official archives while improving the quality of all records.

As a work in progress, this idea of the Participatory Heritage Commons has two roles: an academic thought experiment to frame my research, and as a provocation for GLAMs (galleries, museums, libraries, archives) to think outside their individual walls. As a vision for 'open source history', it's inspired by community archives, public history, participant digitisation and history from below… This combination of a large underlying repository and more intimate interfaces could be quite powerful. Capturing some of the knowledge generated when scholars access collections would benefit both archives and other researchers.

'Niche projects' can be built on a Participatory Commons

As a platform for crowdsourcing, the Participatory Commons provides efficiencies of scale in the backend work for verifying and validating contributions, managing user accounts, forums, etc. But that doesn't mean that each user would experience the same front-end interface.

Niche projects build on the Participatory Commons
(quick and dirty image: Mia Ridge)

My research so far suggests that tightly-focused projects are better able to motivate participants and create a sense of community. These 'niche' projects may be related to a particular location, period or topic, or to a particular type of material. The success of the New York Public Library's What's on the Menu project, designed around a collection of historic menus, and the British Library's GeoReferencer project, designed around their historic map collection, both demonstrate the value of defining projects around niche topics.

The best crowdsourcing projects use carefully designed interactions tailored to the specific content, audience and data requirements of a given project. These interactions are usually For example, the Zooniverse body of projects use much of the same underlying software but projects are designed around specific tasks on specific types of material, whether classifying simple galaxy types, plankton or animals on the Serengeti, or transcribing ship logs or military diaries.

The Participatory Commons is not only a collection of content, it also allows 'niche' projects to be layered on top, presenting more focused sets of content, and specialist interfaces designed around the content, audience and purpose.

Barriers

But there are still many barriers to consider, including copyright and technical issues and important cultural issues around authority, reliability, trust, academic credit and authorship. [There's more background on this at my earlier post on historians and the Participatory Commons and Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources.]

Now I want to set the idea of the Participatory Commons aside for a moment, and return to crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. I've been looking for factors in the success or otherwise of crowdsourcing projects, from grassroots, community-lead projects to big glamorous institutionally-lead sites.

I mentioned that Nisha found transcribing text relaxing. Like many people who start transcribing text, she found herself getting interested in the events, people and places mentioned in the text. Forums or other methods for participants to discuss their questions seem to help keep participants motivated, and they also provide somewhere for a spark of curiosity to grow (as in this forum post). We know that some people on crowdsourcing projects like Old Weather get interested in history, and even start their own research projects.

Crowdsourcing as gateway to further activity

You can see that happening on other crowdsourcing projects too. For example, Herbaria@Homeaims to document historical herbarium collections within museums based on photographs of specimen cards. So far participants have documented over 130,000 historic specimens. In the process, some participants also found themselves being interested in the people whose specimens they were documenting.

As a result, the project has expanded to include biographies of the original specimen collectors. It was able to accommodate this new interest through a project wiki, which has a combination of free text and structured data linking records between the transcribed specimen cards and individual biographies.

'Levels of Engagement' in citizen science

There's a consistent enough pattern in science crowdsourcing projects that there's a model from 'citizen science' that outlines different stages participants can move through, from undertaking simple tasks, joining in community discussion, through to 'working independently on self-identified research projects'.[1]

Is this 'mission accomplished'?

This is Nick Poole's word cloud based on 40 museum missionstatements. With words like 'enjoyment', 'access', 'learning' appearing in museum missions, doesn't this mean that turning transcribers into citizen historians while digitising and enhancing collections is a success? Well, yes, but…

Paths diverge; paradox ahead?

There's a tension between GLAM's desire to invite people to 'go deeper', to find their own research interests, to begin to become citizen historians; and the desire to ask people to help us with tasks set by GLAMs to help their work. Heritage organisations can try to channel that impulse to start research into questions about their own collections, but sometimes it feels like we're asking people to do our homework for us. The scaffolds put in place to help make tasks easier may start to feel like a constraint.

Who has agency?

If people move beyond simple tasks into more complex tasks that require a greater investment of time and learning, then issues of agency – participants' ability to make choices about what they're working on and why – start to become more important. Would Wikipedia have succeeded if it dictated what contributors had to write about? We shouldn't mistake volunteers for a workforce just because they can be impressively dedicated contributors.

Participatory project models

Turning again to citizen science – this time public participation in science research, we have a model for participatory projects according to the amount of control participants have over the design of the project itself – or to look at it another way, how much authority the organisation has ceded to the crowd. This model contains three categories: 'contributory', where the public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation; 'collaborative', where the public can help refine project design and analyse data in a project lead by the organisation; and 'co-creative', where the public can take part in all or nearly all processes, and all parties design the project together.[2]

As you can imagine, truly co-creative projects are rare. It seems cultural organisations find it hard to truly collaborate with members of the public; for many understandable reasons. The level of transparency required, and the investment of time for negotiating mutual interests, goals and capabilities increase as collaboration deepens. Institutional constraints and lack of time to engage in deep dialogue with participants make it difficult to find shared goals that work for all parties. It seems GLAMs sometimes try to take shortcuts and end up making decisions for the group, which means their 'co-creative' project is actually more just 'collaborative'.

New challenges

When participants start to out-grow the tasks that originally got them hooked, projects face a choice. Some projects are experimenting with setting challenges for participants. Here you see 'mysteries' set by the UK's Museum of Design in Plastics, and by San FranciscoPublic Library on History Pin. Finding the right match between the challenge set and the object can be difficult without some existing knowledge of the collection, and it can require a lot of on-going time to encourage participants. Putting the mystery under the nose of the person who has the knowledge or skills to solve it is another challenge that projects like this will have to tackle.

Working with existing communities of interest is a good start, but it also takes work to figure out where they hang out online (or in-person) and understand how they prefer to work. GLAMs sometimes fall into the trap of choosing the technology first, or trying something because it's trendy; it's better to start with the intersection between your content and the preferences of potential audiences.

But is it wishful thinking to hope that others will be interested in answering the questions GLAMs are asking?

A tension?

Should projects accept that some people will move on as they develop new interests, and concentrate on recruiting new participants to replace them? Do they try to find more interesting tasks or new responsibilities for participants, such as helping moderate discussions, or checking and validating other people's work? Or should they find ways for the project grow as participants' skill and knowledge increase? It's important to make these decisions mindfully as the default is otherwise to accept a level of turnover as participants move on.

To return to lessons from citizen science, possible areas for deeper involvement include choosing or defining questions for study, analysing or interpreting data and drawing conclusions, discussing results and asking new questions.[3]However, heritage organisations might have to accept that the questions people want to ask might not involve their collections, and that these citizen historians' new interests might not leave time for their previous crowdsourcing tasks.

Why is a critical mass of content in a Participatory Commons useful?

And now we return to the Participatory Commons and the question of why a critical mass of content would be useful.

Increasingly, the old divisions between museum, library and archive collections don't make sense. For most people, content is content, and they don't understand why a pamphlet about a village fete in 1898 would be described and accessed differently depending on whether it had ended up in a museum, library or archive catalogue.

Basing niche projects on a wider range of content creates opportunities for different types of tasks and levels of responsibility. Projects that provide a variety of tasks and roles can support a range of different levels and types of participant skills, availability, knowledge and experience.

A critical mass of material is also important for the discoverability of heritage content. Even the most sophisticated researcher turns to Google sometimes, and if your content doesn't come up in the first few results, many researchers will never know it exists. It's easy to say but less easy to make a reality: the easier it is to find your collections, the more likely it is that researchers will use them.

Commons as party?

More importantly, a critical mass of content in a Commons allows us to re-define 'winning'. If participation is narrowly defined as belonging to individual GLAMs, when a citizen historian moves onto a project that doesn't involve your collection then it can seem like you've lost a collaborator. But the people who developed a new research interest through a project at one museum might find they end up using records from the archive down the road, and transcribing or enhancing their records during their investigation. If all the institutions in the region shared their records on the Commons or let researchers take and share photos while using their collections, the researcher has a critical mass of content for their research and hopefully as a side-effect, their activities will improve links between collections. If the Commons allows GLAMs to take a sector-wide view then someone moving on to a different collection becomes a moment to celebrate, a form of graduation. In our wildest imagination, the Commons could be like a fabulous party where you never know what fabulous interesting people and things you'll discover…

To conclude – by designing platforms that allow people to collect and improve records as they work, we're helping everybody win.

Thank you! I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[1]M. Jordan Raddick et al., 'Citizen Science: Status and Research Directions for the Coming Decade', in astro2010: The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, vol. 2010, 2009, http://www8.nationalacademies.org/astro2010/DetailFileDisplay.aspx?id=454.

[2]Rick Bonney et al., Public Participation in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report (Washington D.C.: Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), July 2009), http://caise.insci.org/uploads/docs/PPSR%20report%20FINAL.pdf.

[3]Bonney et al., Public Participation in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report.

Image credits in order of appearance: Glider, Library of Congress, Great hall, Library of Congress, Curzona Allport from Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Hålanda Church, Västergötland, Sweden, Swedish National Heritage Board, Smithsonian Institution, Postmaster, General James A. Farley During National Air Mail Week, 1938, Powerhouse Museum, Canterbury Bankstown Rugby League Football Club's third annual Ball.

'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations' at VALA2014

I've just spent a week in Melbourne (my home town, awww) for VALA2014. VALA is about 'libraries, technology and the future' and the conference theme for 2014 was 'streaming with possibilities'. Kim Tairi's briefing (as Chair of the VALA2014 Conference Programme Committee) included the phrases 'stories that will ignite, challenge and excite our audience' and 'don’t be afraid to be controversial or push the boundaries', which was a brilliant challenge and turned out to be a great introduction to the ethos of the conference.

Image by Con Wiebrands 萬事如意 @flexnib

My keynote was on 'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations'. From my abstract: Should museums, libraries and archives be places for looking at old stuff other people have made, or could they also be places where new creations are inspired and made? If making – writing, designing, building – is the deepest level of engagement with heritage and culture, how can memory institutions avoid the comforting but deadly trap of broadcasting at the public and instead create spaces for curating, creating or conversing with them? Somehow that meant a romp through banana pianos, the link between knitting and historic newspapers, why I like coding, the value of tinkering, secret shoppers and the fact that everyone is a maker of some sort (or was in the past).

Update: videos of the keynotes are now available online! I haven't watched any cos I don't have the Silverlight. I'd recommend them all, but I'm particularly looking forward to re-watching Gene Tan and Matt Finch's keynotes.

I'm sharing my slides below, but Slideshare seems to have stopped including the speaker notes so they're best viewed in conjunction with either of the two blog posts about my keynote that appeared with impressive speed or the tweets from my session. I've storified the tweets at Tweets from keynote 'Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations' at VALA14 – the audience did a fantastic job of summarising my speech, adding their own questions and comments, and sharing links to the sites and projects I mentioned. Yay, librarians! The two posts are Deborah '@deborahfitchett' Fitchett's Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations and Richard '@penanghill' Hayward's Mia Ridge on the Maker Movement (on an unrelated-but-home town note, Richard was my boss many, many years ago!).

Bringing maker culture to cultural organisations from Mia

Huge thanks to the organisers for the invitation to speak, to the conference staff for making everything run so smoothly, to the other keynotes for their inspiration and to the attendees for being such good sports.

2013 in review: crowdsourcing, digital history, visualisation, and lots and lots of words

A quick and incomplete summary of my 2013 for those days when I wonder where the year went… My PhD was my main priority throughout the year, but the slow increase in word count across my thesis is probably only of interest to me and my supervisors (except where I've turned down invitations to concentrate on my PhD). Various other projects have spanned the years: my edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage', working as a consultant on the 'Let's Get Real' project with Culture24, and I've continued to work with the Open University Digital Humanities Steering Group, ACH and to chair the Museums Computer Group.

In January (and April/June) I taught all-day workshops on 'Data Visualisation for Analysis in Scholarly Research' and 'Crowdsourcing in Libraries, Museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions' for the British Library's Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

In February I was invited to give a keynote on 'Crowd-sourcing as participation' at iSay: Visitor-Generated Content in Heritage Institutions in Leicester (my event notes). This was an opportunity to think through the impact of the 'close reading' people do while transcribing text or describing images, crowdsourcing as a form of deeper engagement with cultural heritage, and the potential for 'citizen history' this creates (also finally bringing together my museum work and my PhD research). This later became an article for Curator journal, From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing (proof copy available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117). I also ran a workshop on 'Data visualisation for humanities researchers' with Dr. Elton Barker (one of my PhD supervisors) for the CHASE 'Going Digital' doctoral training programme.

In March I was in the US for THATCamp Feminisms in Claremont, California (my notes), to do a workshop on Data visualisation as a gateway to programming and I gave a paper on 'New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women's History on Wikipedia' at the Women's History in the Digital World' conference at Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia (posted as 'New challenges in digital history: sharing women's history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes'). I also wrote an article for Museum Identity magazine, Where next for open cultural data in museums?.

In April I gave a paper, 'A thousand readers are wanted, and confidently asked for': public participation as engagement in the arts and humanities, on my PhD research at Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities (see also my notes from the event), and a keynote on 'A Brief History of Open Cultural Data' at GLAM-WIKI 2013.

In May I gave an online seminar on crowdsourcing (with a focus on how it might be used in teaching undergraduates wider skills) for the NITLE Shared Academics series. I gave a short paper on 'Digital participation and public engagement' at the London Museums Group's 'Museums and Social Media' at Tate Britain on May 24, and was in Belfast for the Museums Computer Group's Spring meeting, 'Engaging Visitors Through Play' then whipped across to Venice for a quick keynote on 'Participatory Practices: Inclusion, Dialogue and Trust' (with Helen Weinstein) for the We Curate kick-off seminar at the start of June.

In June the Collections Trust and MCG organised a Museum Informatics event in York and we organised a 'Failure Swapshop' the evening before. I also went to Zooniverse's ZooCon (my notes on the citizen science talks) and to Canterbury Cathedral Archives for a CHASE event on 'Opening up the archives: Digitization and user communities'.

In July I chaired a session on Digital Transformations at the Open Culture 2013 conference in London on July 2, gave an invited lightning talk at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2013, ran a half-day workshop on 'Designing successful digital humanities crowdsourcing projects' at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference in Nebraska, and had an amazing time making what turned out to be Serendip-o-matic at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University's One Week, One Tool in Fairfax, Virginia (my posts on the process), with a museumy road trip via Amtrak and Greyhound to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburg inbetween the two events.

In August I tidied up some talk notes for publication as 'Tips for digital participation, engagement and crowdsourcing in museums' on the London Museums Group blog.

October saw the publication of my Curator article and Creating Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives through Design with Don Lafreniere and Scott Nesbit for the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, based on our work at the Summer 2012 NEH Advanced Institute on Spatial Narrative and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities. (I also saw my family in Australia and finally went to MONA).

In November I presented on 'Messy understandings in code' at Speaking in Code at UVA's Scholars' Lab, Charlottesville, Virginia, gave a half-day workshop on 'Data Visualizations as an Introduction to Computational Thinking' at the University of Manchester and spoke at the Digital Humanities at Manchester conference the next day. Then it was down to London for the MCG's annual conference, Museums on the Web 2013 at Tate Modern. Later than month I gave a talk on 'Sustaining Collaboration from Afar' at Sustainable History: Ensuring today's digital history survives.

In December I went to Hannover, Germany for the Herrenhausen Conference: "(Digital) Humanities Revisited – Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Age" where I presented on 'Creating a Digital History Commons through crowdsourcing and participant digitisation' (my lightning talk notes and poster are probably the best representation of how my PhD research on public engagement through crowdsourcing and historians' contributions to scholarly resources through participant digitisation are coming together). In final days of 2013, I went back to my old museum metadata games, and updated them to include images from the British Library and took a first pass at making them responsive for mobile and tablet devices.