Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, Edited by Mia Ridge

Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage provides a comprehensive view on the subject of working with our communities to increase our reach and enhance our collections. Though the book covers the entire GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums), there’s much here to learn and consider for libraries who work in this space

Introduction

This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice in the emerging field of cultural heritage crowdsourcing. 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

Strokes of serendipity: community co-curation and engagement with digital heritage

This article explores the potential that community–led digital engagement with heritage holds for stimulating active citizenship through taking responsibility for shared cultural heritage and for fostering long-lasting relationships between local community heritage groups and national museums. Through the lens of a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in- Residence, we discovered that — despite working with community groups that were already loyal to and enjoyed existing working ties with the Science Museum in London, U.K — this undertaking proved challenging owing to a range of structural and logistical issues even before the application of digital devices and tools had been considered. These challenges notwithstanding, the pilot found that the creation of time and space for face-to-face dialogue and interactions between the Science Museum and the participating community heritage groups helped to establish the parameters within which digital co-curation can effectively occur. This, in turn, informed the development of a digital prototype with huge potential to enable remote, virtual connectivity to, and interactivity with, conversations about shared heritage. The ultimate goal was two-fold: (a) to help facilitate collaborative sense-making of our shared past, and (b) to aid the building of sustainable institutional and community/public working ties around emerging affinities, agendas and research questions in relation to public history and heritage

Crowding the library : how and why libraries are using crowdsourcing to engage the public

Over the past 10 years, there has been a noticeable increase of crowdsourcing projects in cultural heritage institutions, where digital technologies are being used to open up their collections and encourage the public to engage with them in a very direct way. Libraries, archives and museums have long had a history and mandate of outreach and public engagement but crowdsourcing marks a move towards a more participatory and inclusive model of engagement. If a library wants to start a crowdsourcing project, what do they need to know? This article is written from a Canadian University library perspective with the goal to help the reader engage with the current crowdsourcing landscape. This article’s contribution includes a literature review and a survey of popular projects and platforms; followed by a case study of a crowdsourcing pilot completed at the McGill Library. The article pulls these two threads of theory and practice together—with a discussion of some of the best practices learned through the literature and real-life experience, giving the reader practical tools to help a library evaluate if crowdsourcing is right for them, and how to get a desired project off the ground

Greater good, empowerment and democratization? Affordances of the crowdsourcing transcription projects

Digital technology and Internet access have created new possibilities for museums and archives for digitization of their collections. Steadily, more museums are experimenting with inviting their audiences to participate in tagging images, annotating, transcribing historical texts or cropping photographs. This article is an exploration of visual and functional aspects of various digital interfaces frequently being used in crowdsourcing projects involving transcribing manuscripts. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with the editors of the projects and systematic technical walkthroughs of MediaWiki platforms (Edvard Munch’s Writings and Transcribe Bentham) and Zooniverse platforms (AnnoTate and Shakespeare’s World). The analysis aims to explore platforms’ affordances (Gibson 1978), in other words the opportunities that the layout and design offer to users interacting with facsimiles of manuscripts (‘digital networked objects’) (Cameron and Mengler 2015). The questions raised are whether and how the interfaces empower users and perform as a democratic actor providing the volunteers with agency. The platforms’ interfaces have emerged as an important and undervalued actor-network of elements which configure heterogeneous relations among actors and influence users’ engagement

Of Scribes and Scripts: Citizen Science and the Cairo Genizah

In August 2017, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, in partnership with the Princeton Geniza Project, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University, and the Zooniverse, began the first phase of a larger project to attempt to sort and transcribe Cairo Geniza fragments, entitled “Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.” This article describes the first phase of the projects and its results

The Impact of Networks of Public on Crowdsourcing in the UK Heritage Sector

This research explores the interaction between internal heritage personnel and the public over social media. Focusing on the phenomena of crowdsourcing and what it means to the individuals involved with it, the study employs a qualitative, interpretive approach, focusing on contemporary history (\u27living memory\u27) interactions between participants of three UK Armed Forces museums and the public. Using the conceptual framework of networks of practice as a sensitizing concept in order to gain insight into how museum personnel employ, instigate and respond to the activity of crowdsourcing, participant interviews were analyzed using Grounded Theory Methodology. The findings challenge contentions in literature on the formation of, and knowledge exchange in, networks of practice suggesting that rather than extending existing understanding of such networks, a new form of electronic network has emerged around the museum context: the network of public

Digital Shoeboxes: the history and future of personal performance archiving

Personal performance archiving describes a practice in which individuals who regularly attend live performances document their experiences, usually through the collection of documents such as programmes, playbills, cast sheets, ticket stubs, posters and leaflets. This is a form of documenting performance which intersects with the related field of serious leisure. Personal performance archiving relies on the collection and storage of physical documents, yet in this age of rapidly advancing digital technologies and social media, born-digital documents are beginning to take precedence in event management. This will undoubtedly affect these kinds of hobbyist archivists. This project strives to understand three main topics; what information can be taken from archived performance documents, how audience members are currently documenting and archiving their experience, and how the increase of digitisation and born-digital documents will affect this practice. This project used a survey to determine the current collecting and archiving preferences of modern theatregoers, several collections of physical and digitised programmes to compare style and content over different eras, and contains a literature review concerning current and future digital modes of performance documentation