wish upon a star: making crowdsourcing in cultural heritage a reality
TRANSCRIPT
Wish upon a star: making crowdsourcing in cultural heritage a reality
Digikult 2017Dr Mia Ridge @mia_out
Digital Curator, British Library
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons/15472779199
https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/4659373140
Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is...
...asking the public to do tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal related to cultural
heritage collections or knowledge
...often 'microtasks' like transcribing or categorising
http://familysearch.org
Technology helps... But ultimately crowdsourcing
is all about people
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/02/james-murray/
James Murray, editor, OED, with contributor slips
Why ask the public to help?
Defining success: productivity
Defining success: reach
http://community.zooniverse.org/
http://herbariaunited.org
Defining success: engagement
Example projects
'Type what you see''Describe what you see''Share what you know''Validate other inputs'
FamilySearch Indexing
Ancient Liveshttp://ancientlives.org
Flickr and Flickr Commons
Art UK Tagger
PCF Image Recognition
Micropasts photo masking
http://micropasts.org
Crowdsourcing in the real world
https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3072281873
Motivations as design guidelines
https://www.flickr.com/photos/statensarkiver/8975684669
Altruistic motivations• helping to provide an accurate record of
local history
Intrinsic motivations• reading 18thC handwriting is an
enjoyable puzzle
Extrinsic motivations• an academic collecting a quote from a
primary source
Understand why people participate
Use motivations as design guidelines
https://www.flickr.com/photos/statensarkiver/8975684669
People want:• satisfying work to do• the experience of being good at something• time spent with people we like• the chance to be a part of something bigger
(Jane McGonigal, 2009)
Put work into invitations
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14592517038
Be prepared for window shoppers
https://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/6841092248
Make it easy to get started
Good task design is hard
Task complexity vs audience size
https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162650585
Tedi
um
Com
plex
ity
Participation
Design task ecosystems
http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/
http://transcription.si.edu/
Revel in niche topics and challenges
'no plan survives contact with the crowd'
With apologies to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856
It takes work to be a good host
Design for on-going participation
What support do staff need?https://www.flickr.com/photos/stockholmtransportmuseum_commons/8744070574
Plan for ingest and workflow
Plan a graceful exithttps://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545543824
Tack!
A question for you
If enhanced data was available (e.g. from crowdsourcing or
computational methods), how could you overcome barriers to
integrate it into your core cataloguing systems?
Who am I?• Digital Curator, BL• 'Making Digital History:
the impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research'
• MSc in human-computer interaction: crowdsourcing games to improve object metadata to enhance museum collections