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

Citizen History and its discontents

An increasing number of crowdsourcing projects are making claims about ‘citizen history’ – but are they really helping people become historians, or are they overstating their contribution? Can citizen history projects succeed without communities of experts and peers to nurture sparks of historical curiosity and support novice historians in learning the skills of the discipline? Through a series of case studies this paper offers a critical examination of claims around citizen history

All change please: your museum and audiences online

In this new ground-breaking book leading innovators from both sides of the Atlantic explore how museums can create an effective social media strategy to engage with new and existing audiences. This pioneering volume comprises of influential museum professionals explaining how to use social media to: reach new audiences; enhance access; increase visitor participation; enable and attract user-generated content; create new marketing opportunities; expand brand development; increase revenue generation; and improve the overall visitor experience

Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research

This thesis investigates tow key questions: firstly, how do two broad groups - academic, family and local historians, and the public - evaluate, use, and contribute to digital history resources? And consequently, what impact have digital technologies had on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research? Analysing the impact of design on participant experiences and the reception of digital historiography by demonstrating the value of methods drawn from human-computer interaction, including heuristic evaluation, trace ethnography and semi-structured interviews. This thesis also investigates the relationship between heritage crowdsourcing projects (which ask the public to help with meaningful, inherently rewarding tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge) and the development of historical skills and interests. It situates crowdsourcing and citizen history within the broader field of participatory digital history and then focuses on the impact of digitality on the research practices of faculty and community historians. Chapter 1 provides an overview of over 400 digital history projects aimed at engaging the public or collecting, creating or enhancing records about historical materials for scholarly and general audiences. Chapter 2 discusses design factors that may influence the success of crowdsourcing projects. Following this, Chapter 3 explores the ways in which some crowdsourcing projects encourage deeper engagement with history or science, and the role of communities of practice in citizen history. Chapter 4 shifts our focus from public participation to scholarly practices in historical research, presenting the results of interviews conducted with 29 faculty and community historians. Finally, the Conclusion draws together the threads that link public participation and scholarly practices, teasing out the ways in which the practices of discovering, gathering, creating and sharing historical materials and knowledge have been affected by digital methods, tools and resources

New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women\u27s History on Wikipedia

In 1908 Ina von Grumbkow undertook an expedition to Iceland. She later made significant contributions to the field of natural history and wrote several books but other than passing references online and a mention on her husband\u27s Wikipedia page, her story is only available to those with access to sources like the \u27Earth Sciences History\u27 journal. Cumulative centuries of archival and theoretical work have been spent recovering women\u27s histories, yet much of this inspiring scholarship is invisible outside academia. Inspired by research into the use and creation of digital resources and the wider impact of these resources on historians and their scholarship, this paper is a deliberate provocation: if we believe the subjects of our research are important, then we should ensure they are represented on freely available encyclopedic sites like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world and the first port of call for most students and the public, yet women\u27s history is poorly represented. This paper discusses how the difficulties of adding women\u27s histories to Wikipedia exemplify some of the new challenges and opportunities of digital history and the ways in which it blurs the line between public history and purely academic research

Wellcome Library Transcribing Recipes Project: Final Report

The Wellcome Library, in considering a project to digitise and transcribe recipe manuscripts using crowdsourcing technologies, commissioned this report from Ben Brumfield and Mia Ridge in Summer 2015. The report addresses issues specific to this project, and to the Wellcome Library's digital infrastructure

The Tony Dyson Archive Project

Report of a pilot study investigating the creation of a digital archive of medieval property transactions along the City waterfron

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

Have you ever wanted to recruit hundreds of members of the public to assist with the task of making cultural heritage collections findable online? Or to connect with passionate volunteers who'll share their discoveries with you? Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is a broad term for projects that ask the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge. As participants receive no financial reward, the activities and/or goals should be inherently rewarding for those volunteering their time. This definition is partly descriptive and partly proscriptive, and this chapter is largely concerned with explaining/describing how to meet the standards it implies. [A draft (not quite pre-print) version of my chapter for the Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities, edited by Kristen Schuster, Stuart Dunn, 2021. ISBN 9781138363021

Playing with difficult objects: game designs for crowdsourcing museum metadata

This project explores the potential for casual browser-based games to help improve the quality of museum catalogue records. The project goal was to design and build casual yet compelling games that would have a positive impact on a practical level, helping improve the mass of 'difficult' – technical, near-duplicate, poorly catalogued or scantily digitised – records that make up the majority of many history museum collections. The project was successful in designing games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections: Dora, a tagging game, and Donald, an experimental 'trivia' game that explored emergent game-play around longer forms of content that required some form of research or personal reference

From libraries as patchwork to datasets as assemblages?

A position paper for the IMLS-funded National Forum, 'Always Already Computational - Collections as Data' (https://collectionsasdata.github.io/