Three ways you can help with 'In their own words: collecting experiences of the First World War' (and a CENDARI project update)

Somehow it's a month since I posted about my CENDARI research project (in Moving forward: modelling and indexing WWI battalions) on this site. That probably reflects the rhythm of the project - less trying to work out what I want to do and more getting on with doing it. A draft post I started last month simply said, 'A lot of battalions were involved in World War One'. I'll do a retrospective post soon, and here's a quick summary of on-going work.

First, a quick recap. My project has two goals - one, to collect a personal narrative for each battalion in the Allied armies of the First World War; two, to create a service that would allow someone to ask 'where was a specific battalion at a specific time?'. Together, they help address a common situation for people new to WWI history who might ask something like 'I know my great-uncle was in the 27th Australian battalion in March 1916, where would he have been and what would he have experienced?'.

I've been working on streamlining and simplifying the public-facing task of collecting a personal narrative for each battalion, and have written a blog post, Help collect soldiers’ experiences of WWI in their own words, that reduces it to three steps:

1. Take one of the diaries, letters and memoirs listed on the Collaborative Collections wiki, and
2. Match its author with a specific regiment or battalion.
3. Send in the results via this form.

If you know of a local history society, family historian or anyone else who might be interested in helping, please send them along to this post: Help collect soldiers’ experiences of WWI in their own words.

Work on specifying the relevant data structures to support a look-up service to answer questions about a specific units location and activities at a specific time largely moved to the wiki:

• Talk:British battalions and regiments in World War I
• Talk:British Army Hierarchies
• Template talk:Battalion - what information should be recorded on every battalion/unit page?
• Template talk:Infobox command structure - what structured data should be recorded about military hierarchies?
• Template talk:Infobox theatre of war/doc - what structured data should be recorded about a unit's activities and engagements in the war?
• Template talk:Infobox military unit - what structured data should be recorded about a battalion/unit?

You can see the infobox structures in progress by flipping from the talk to the Template tabs. You'll need to request an account to join in but more views, sample data and edge cases would be really welcome.

Populating the list of battalions and other units has been a huge task in itself, partly because very few cultural institutions have definitive lists of units they can (or want to) share, but it's necessary to support both core goals. I've been fortunate to have help (see 'Thanks and recent contributions' on 'How you can help') but the task is on-going so get in touch if you can help!

So there are three different ways you can help with 'In their own words: collecting experiences of the First World War':

• collect diaries linked to specific battalions; 
• help check or complete the lists of Australian battalions, British battalions and regiments, Canadian battalions and regiments, Indian battalions, Italian battalions and New Zealand battalions in World War; 
• review and contribute to the data structures needed to record information about military units in the Talk and Template pages above

Finally, last week I was in New Zealand to give a keynote on this work at the National Digital Forum. The video for 'Collaborative collections through a participatory commons' is online, so you can catch up on the background for my project if you've got 40 minutes or so to spare. Should you be in Dublin, I'm giving a talk on 'A pilot with public participation in historical research: linking lived experiences of the First World War' at the Trinity Long Room Hub today (thus the poster).

And if you've made it this far, perhaps you'd like to apply for a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowships 2015 yourself?

Moving forward: modelling and indexing WWI battalions

A super-quick update from my CENDARI Fellowship this week. I set up the wiki for In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War a week ago but only got stuck into populating it with lists of various national battalions this week. My current task list, copied from the front page is to:

•  Populate list of military units: Australian battalions in World War I, British battalions and regiments in World War I), Canadian battalions in World War I, Indian battalions in World War I, Italian battalions in World War I, New Zealand battalions in World War I. A list of battalions is needed to form the basis for the collecting process. (I'm starting with a list of divisions because I can get it from Wikipedia, but I know this is problematic)
• Collate lists of personal diaries, letters, memoirs that can be linked to units through their authors
• Collate lists of official unit diaries and histories
• Collate resources on researching World War One records to help researchers know where to start
• Create a sample battalion page as a demonstrator to show how personal accounts can be linked
• Collate information about private letters, diaries and memoirs

If you can help with any of that, let me know! Or just get stuck in and edit the site.

I've started another Google Doc with very sketchy Notes towards modelling information about World War One Battalions. I need to test it with more battalion histories and update it iteratively. At this stage my thinking is to turn it into an InfoBox format to create structured data via the wiki. It's all very lo-fi and much less designed than my usual projects, but I'm hoping people will be able to help regardless.

So, in this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military unit in the British Army. Can you help? 

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
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
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
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...

1. Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn, Shelley Bernstein; 
2. Old Weather: approaching collections from a different angle, Lucinda Blaser; 
3. ‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work’: Transcribe Bentham and crowdsourcing manuscript collections, Tim Causer and Melissa Terras; 
4. Build, analyse and generalise: community transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the development of Scripto, Sharon M. Leon; 
5. What's on the menu?: crowdsourcing at the New York Public Library, Michael Lascarides and Ben Vershbow; 
6. 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; 
7. Waisda?: making videos findable through crowdsourced annotations, Johan Oomen, Riste Gligorov and Michiel Hildebrand; 
8. Your Paintings Tagger: crowdsourcing descriptive metadata for a national virtual collection, Kathryn Eccles and Andrew Greg.
9. Crowdsourcing: Crowding out the archivist? Locating crowdsourcing within the broader landscape of participatory archives, Alexandra Eveleigh; 
10.  How the crowd can surprise us: humanities crowdsourcing and the creation of knowledge, Stuart Dunn and Mark Hedges; 
11. The role of open authority in a collaborative web, Lori Byrd Phillips; 
12. 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.

Does citizen science invite sabotage?

Q: Does citizen science invite sabotage?

A: No.

Ok, you may want a longer version. There's a paper on crowdsourcing competitions that has lost some important context in doing the rounds of media outlets. For example, on Australia's ABC, 'Citizen science invites sabotage':

'a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface is urging caution at this time of unprecedented reliance on citizen science. It's found crowdsourced research is vulnerable to sabotage. [...] MANUEL CEBRIAN: Money doesn't really matter, what matters is that you can actually get something - whether that's recognition, whether that's getting a contract, whether that's actually positioning an idea, for instance in the pro and anti-climate change debate - whenever you can actually get ahead.'.

The fact that the research is studying crowdsourcing competitions, which are fundamentally different to other forms of crowdsourcing that do not have a 'winner takes all' dynamic, is not mentioned. It also does not mention the years of practical and theoretical work on task validation which makes it quite difficult for someone to get enough data past various controls to significantly alter the results of crowdsourced or citizen science projects.

You can read the full paper for free, but even the title, Crowdsourcing contest dilemma, and the abstract makes the very specific scope of their study clear:

Crowdsourcing offers unprecedented potential for solving tasks efficiently by tapping into the skills of large groups of people. A salient feature of crowdsourcing—its openness of entry—makes it vulnerable to malicious behaviour. Such behaviour took place in a number of recent popular crowdsourcing competitions. We provide game-theoretic analysis of a fundamental trade-off between the potential for increased productivity and the possibility of being set back by malicious behaviour. Our results show that in crowdsourcing competitions malicious behaviour is the norm, not the anomaly—a result contrary to the conventional wisdom in the area. Counterintuitively, making the attacks more costly does not deter them but leads to a less desirable outcome. These findings have cautionary implications for the design of crowdsourcing competitions.

And from the paper itself:

'We study a non-cooperative situation where two players (or firms) compete to obtain a better solution to a given task. [...] The salient feature is that there is only one winner in the competition. [...] In scenarios of ‘competitive’ crowdsourcing, where there is an inherent desire to hurt the opponent, attacks on crowdsourcing strategies are essentially unavoidable.'
From Crowdsourcing contest dilemma by Victor Naroditskiy, Nicholas R. Jennings, Pascal Van Hentenryck and Manuel Cebrian. Published 20 August 2014 doi: 10.1098/​rsif.2014.0532 J. R. Soc. Interface 6 October 2014 vol. 11 no. 99 20140532

I don't know about you, but 'an inherent desire to hurt the opponent' doesn't sound like the kinds of cooperative crowdsourcing projects we tend to see in citizen science or cultural heritage crowdsourcing.   The study is interesting, but it is not generalisable to 'crowdsourcing' as a whole.

If you're interested in crowdsourcing competitions, you may also be interested in: On the trickiness of crowdsourcing competitions: some lessons from Sydney Design from May 2013. 

Helping us fly? Machine learning and crowdsourcing

Moon Machine by Bernard Brussel-Smith via Serendip-o-matic

Over the past few years we've seen an increasing number of projects that take the phrase 'human-computer interaction' literally (or perhaps turning HCI into human-computer integration), organising tasks done by people and by computers into a unified system. One of the most obvious benefits of crowdsourcing on digital platforms has been the ability to coordinate the distribution and validation of tasks, but now data classified by people through crowdsourcing is being fed into computers to improve machine learning so that computers can learn to recognise images almost as well as we do. I've outlined a few projects putting this approach to work below. Of course, this creates new challenges for the future - what do cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects do when all the fun tasks like image tagging and text transcription can be done by computers? After all, Fast Company reports 'at least one Zooniverse project, Galaxy Zoo Supernova, has already automated itself out of existence'. More positively, assuming we can find compelling reasons for people to spend time with cultural heritage collections, how does machine learning and task coordination free us to fly further?

The Public Catalogue Foundation has taken tags created through Your Paintings Tagger and turned them over to computers. As they explain, the results are impressive. The art of computer image recognition: 'Using the 3.5 million or so tags provided by taggers, the research team at Oxford 'educated' image-recognition software to recognise the top tagged terms. Professor Zisserman explains this is a three stage process. Firstly, gather all paintings tagged by taggers with a particular subject (e.g. ‘horse’). Secondly, use feature extraction processes to build an ‘object model’ of a horse (a set of characteristics a painting might have that would indicate that a horse is present). Thirdly, run this algorithm over the Your Paintings database and rank paintings according to how closely they match this model.'

The BBC World Service archive ‘used an open-source speech recognition toolkit to listen to every programme and convert it to text’, extracted keywords or tags from the transcripts then got people to check the correctness of the data created: ‘As well as listening to programmes in the archive, users can view the automatic tags and vote on whether they’re correct or incorrect or add completely new tags. They can also edit programme titles and synopses, select appropriate images and name the voices heard’. From Algorithms and Crowd-Sourcing for Digital Archives by Tristan Ferne. See also What we learnt by crowdsourcing the World Service archive by Yves Raimond, Michael Smethurst, Tristan Ferne on 15 September 2014: 'we believe we have shown that a combination of automated tagging algorithms and crowdsourcing can be used to publish a large archive like this quickly and efficiently'.

And of course the Zooniverse is working on this. From their Milky Way project blog, New MWP paper outlines the powerful synergy between citizens scientists, professional scientists, and machine learning: '...a wonderful synergy that can exist between citizen scientists, professional scientists, and machine learning. The example outlined with the Milky Way Project is that citizens can identify patterns that machines cannot detect without training, machine learning algorithms can use citizen science projects as input training sets, creating amazing new opportunities to speed-up the pace of discovery. A hybrid model of machine learning combined with crowdsourced training data from citizen scientists can not only classify large quantities of data, but also address the weakness of each approach if deployed alone.'

The CUbRIK project combines 'machine, human and social computation for multimedia search'. You can try it out at their technical demonstrator, HistoGraph and try to 'collaboratively identify missing information' about historic photographs. [Added October 2014]

If you're interested in the theory, an early discussion of human input into machine learning is in Quinn and Bederson's 2011 Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field. More recently, the SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines project is looking at 'a new kind of emergent, collective problem solving, in which we see (i) problems solved by very large scale human participation via the Web, (ii) access to, or the ability to generate, large amounts of relevant data using open data standards, (iii) confidence in the quality of the data and (iv) intuitive interfaces', including 'citizen science social machines'. If you're really keen, you can get a sense of the state of the field from various conference papers, including ICML ’13 Workshop: Machine Learning Meets Crowdsourcing and ICML ’14 Workshop: Crowdsourcing and Human Computing. There's also a mega-list of academic crowdsourcing conferences and workshops, though it doesn't include much on the tiny corner of the world that is crowdsourcing in cultural heritage.

NB: this post is a bit of a marker so I've somewhere to put thoughts on machine learning and human-computer integration as I finish my thesis; I'll update this post as I collect more references. Do you know of examples I've missed, or implications we should consider? Comment here or on twitter to start the conversation... 

Piloting a Participatory History Commons

I've been awarded a CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin for a project called 'Bridging collections with a participatory Commons: a pilot with World War One archives'. I've posted my proposal at the link above, and when I start in September I'll post about my progress here. CENDARI have now published the list of all 2014 Fellows and a neat summary of the programme: 'The CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowships are intended to support and stimulate historical research in the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War, by facilitating access to key archives, specialist knowledge and collections in CENDARI host institutions'.

As I said in my post, 'it's an ambitious project which requires tackling community building, user experience design, historical materials and programming, and I'll be drawing on the expertise of many people'. I'll post as I go - but first, I'd best get back to finishing up my PhD thesis!

In the meantime, here's a small collection of things I've written as I think through what a participatory commons is and how it might work: my poster and talk notes for Herrenhausen conference and my keynote for Sharing is Caring, 'Enriching cultural heritage collections through a Participatory Commons platform: a provocation about collaborating with users'.

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 http://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 properly 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@Home aims 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.

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[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.

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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.

Early PhD findings: Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources

I wrote up some early findings from my PhD research for conferences back in 2012 when I was working on questions around 'but will historians really use resources created by unknown members of the public?'. People keep asking me for copies of my notes (and I've noticed people citing an online video version which isn't ideal) and since they might be useful and any comments would help me write-up the final thesis, I thought I'd be brave and post my notes.

A million caveats apply - these were early findings, my research questions and focus have changed and I've interviewed more historians and reviewed many more participative history projects since then; as a short paper I don't address methods etc; and obviously it's only a huge part of a tiny topic... (If you're interested in crowdsourcing, you might be interested in other writing related to scholarly crowdsourcing and collaboration from my PhD, or my edited volume on 'Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage'.) So, with those health warnings out of the way, here it is. I'd love to hear from you, whether with critiques, suggestions, or just stories about how it relates to your experience. And obviously, if you use this, please cite it!

Exploring historians' resistance to crowdsourced resources

Scholarly crowdsourcing may be seen as a solution to the backlog of historical material to be digitised, but will historians really use resources created by unknown members of the public?

The Transcribe Bentham project describes crowdsourcing as 'the harnessing of online activity to aid in large scale projects that require human cognition' (Terras, 2010a). 'Scholarly crowdsourcing' is a related concept that generally seems to involve the collaborative creation of resources through collection, digitisation or transcription. Crowdsourcing projects often divide up large tasks (like digitising an archive) into smaller, more manageable tasks (like transcribing a name, a line, or a page); this method has helped digitise vast numbers of primary sources.

My doctoral research was inspired by a vision of 'participant digitization', a form of scholarly crowdsourcing that seeks to capture the digital records and knowledge generated when researchers access primary materials in order to openly share and re-use them. Unlike many crowdsourcing projects which are designed for tasks performed specifically for the project, participant digitization harnesses the transcription, metadata creation, image capture and other activities already undertaken during research and aggregates them to create re-usable collections of resources.

Research questions and concepts

When Howe clarified his original definition, stating that the 'crucial prerequisite' in crowdsourcing is 'the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers', a 'perfect meritocracy' based not on external qualifications but on 'the quality of the work itself', he created a challenge for traditional academic models of authority and credibility (Howe 2006, 2008). Furthermore, how does anonymity or pseudonymity (defined here as often long-standing false names chosen by users of websites) complicate the process of assessing the provenance of information on sites open to contributions from non-academics? An academic might choose to disguise their identity to mask their research activities from competing peers, from a desire to conduct early exploratory work in private or simply because their preferred username was unavailable; but when contributors are not using their real names they cannot derive any authority from their personal or institutional identity. Finally, which technical, social and scholarly contexts would encourage researchers to share (for example) their snippets of transcription created from archival documents, and to use content transcribed by others? What barriers exist to participation in crowdsourcing or prevent the use of crowdsourced content?

Methods

I interviewed academic and family/local historians about how they evaluate, use, and contribute to crowdsourced and traditional resources to investigate how a resource based on 'meritocracy' disrupts current notions of scholarly authority, reliability, trust, and authorship. These interviews aimed to understand current research practices and probe more deeply into how participants assess different types of resources, their feelings about resources created by crowdsourcing, and to discover when and how they would share research data and findings.

I sought historians investigating the same country and time period in order to have a group of participants who faced common issues with the availability and types of primary sources from early modern England. I focused on academic and 'amateur' family or local historians because I was interested in exploring the differences between them to discover which behaviours and attitudes are common to most researchers and which are particular to academics and the pressures of academia.

I recruited participants through personal networks and social media, and conducted interviews in person or on Skype. At the time of writing, 17 participants have been interviewed for up to 2 hours each. It should be noted that these results are of a provisional nature and represent a snapshot of on-going research and analysis.

Early results

I soon discovered that citizen historians are perfect examples of Pro-Ams: 'knowledgeable, educated, committed, and networked' amateurs 'who work to professional standards' (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004; Terras, 2010b).

How do historians assess the quality of resources?

Participants often simply said they drew on their knowledge and experience when sniffing out unreliable documents or statements. When assessing secondary sources, their tacit knowledge of good research and publication practices was evident in common statements like '[I can tell from] it's the way it's written'. They also cited the presence and quality of footnotes, and the depth and accuracy of information as important factors. Transcribed sources introduced another layer of quality assessment - researchers might assess a resource by checking for transcription errors that are often copied from one database to another. Most researchers used multiple sources to verify and document facts found in online or offline sources.

When and how do historians share research data and findings?

It appears that between accessing original records and publishing information, there are several key stages where research data and findings might be shared. Stages include acquiring and transcribing records, producing visualisations like family trees and maps, publishing informal notes and publishing synthesised content or analysis; whether a researcher passes through all the stages depends on their motivation and audience. Information may change formats between stages, and since many claim not to share information that has not yet been sufficiently verified, some information would drop out before each stage. It also appears that in later stages of the research process the size of the potential audience increases and the level of trust required to share with them decreases.

For academics, there may be an additional, post-publication stage when resources are regarded as 'depleted' – once they have published what they need from them, they would be happy to share them. Family historians meanwhile see some value in sharing versions of family trees online, or in posting names of people they are researching to attract others looking for the same names.

Sharing is often negotiated through private channels and personal relationships. Methods of controlling sharing include showing people work in progress on a screen rather than sending it to them and using email in preference to sharing functionality supplied by websites – this targeted, localised sharing allows the researcher to retain a sense of control over early stage data, and so this is one key area where identity matters. Information is often shared progressively, and getting access to more information depends on your behaviour after the initial exchange - for example, crediting the provider in any further use of the data, or reciprocating with good data of your own.

When might historians resist sharing data?

Participants gave a range of reasons for their reluctance to share data. Being able to convey the context of creation and the qualities of the source materials is important for historians who may consider sharing their 'depleted' personal archives - not being able to provide this means they are unlikely to share. Being able to convey information about data reliability is also important. Some information about the reliability of a piece of information is implicitly encoded in its format (for example, in pencil in notebooks versus electronic records), hedging phrases in text, in the number of corroborating sources, or a value judgement about those sources. If it is difficult to convey levels of 'certainty' about reliability when sharing data, it is less likely that people will share it - participants felt a sense of responsibility about not publishing (even informally) information that hasn't been fully verified. This was particularly strong in academics. Some participants confessed to sneaking forbidden photos of archival documents they ran out of time to transcribe in the archive; unsurprisingly it is unlikely they would share those images.

Overall, if historians do not feel they would get information of equal value back in exchange, they seem less likely to share. Professional researchers do not want to give away intellectual property, and feel sharing data online is risky because the protocols of citation and fair use are presently uncertain. Finally, researchers did not always see a point in sharing their data. Family history content was seen as too specific and personal to have value for others; academics may realise the value of their data within their own tightly-defined circles but not realise that their records may have information for other biographical researchers (i.e. people searching by name) or other forms of history.

Which concerns are particular to academic historians?

Reputational risk is an issue for some academics who might otherwise share data. One researcher said: 'we are wary of others trawling through our research looking for errors or inconsistencies. [...] Obviously we were trying to get things right, but if we have made mistakes we don't want to have them used against us. In some ways, the less you make available the better!'. Scholarly territoriality can be an issue – if there is another academic working on the same resources, their attitude may affect how much others share. It is also unclear how academic historians would be credited for their work if it was performed under a pseudonym that does not match the name they use in academia.

What may cause crowdsourced resources to be under-used?

In this research, 'amateur' and academic historians shared many of the same concerns for authority, reliability, and trust. The main reported cause of under-use (for all resources) is not providing access to original documents as well as transcriptions. Researchers will use almost any information as pointers or leads to further sources, but they will not publish findings based on that data unless the original documents are available or the source has been peer-reviewed. Checking the transcriptions against the original is seen as 'good practice', part of a sense of responsibility 'to the world's knowledge'.

Overall, the identity of the data creator is less important than expected - for digitised versions of primary sources, reliability is not vested in the identity of the digitiser but in the source itself. Content found on online sites is tested against a set of finely-tuned ideas about the normal range of documents rather than the authority of the digitiser.

Cite as:

Ridge, Mia. “Early PhD Findings: Exploring Historians’ Resistance to Crowdsourced Resources.” Open Objects, March 19, 2014. http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/early-phd-findings-exploring-historians.html.

References

Howe, J. (undated). Crowdsourcing: A Definition http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com

Howe, J. (2006). Crowdsourcing: A Definition. http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html

Howe, J. (2008). Join the crowd: Why do multinationals use amateurs to solve scientific and technical problems? The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/join-the-crowd-why-do-multinationals-use-amateurs-to-solve-scientific-and-technical-problems-915658.html

Leadbeater, C., and Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society. Demos, London, 2004. http://www.demos.co.uk/files/proamrevolutionfinal.pdf

Terras, M. (2010a) Crowdsourcing cultural heritage: UCL's Transcribe Bentham project. Presented at: Seeing Is Believing: New Technologies For Cultural Heritage. International Society for Knowledge Organization, UCL (University College London). http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/20157/

Terras, M. (2010b). “Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation via Amateur Digitization.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 4 (October 14, 2010): 425–438. http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/fqq019