NITLE 'Crowdsourcing' seminar

Discussion Guide for NITLE Crowdsourcing seminar

Wednesday, May 8, 2013, 1-2 pm EDT, online via NITLE’s desktop videoconferencing platform

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

Slides (8mb PDF).

Discussion Questions

1. Have you ever participated in a crowdsourced project? What did you enjoy about it? Were you motivated to continue? Why/why not?
2. How well do the tasks presented in the seminar and represented in the 'Suggested Projects' below match your students' interests, knowledge and skills? Can you find projects that are a closer match?
3. What else is required for undergraduate participation in crowdsourced projects to help meet liberal education learning outcomes?
4. If crowdsourced projects are designed to meet intrinsic or altruistic motivations for voluntary participation, what are the ethical and practical implications of asking students to participate?
5. What are some of the challenges of collaboration, credit and attribution in scholarly crowdsourcing, and how might you start to resolve them in your work with students?

Suggested Projects

• Depending on your interests, visit one or more of the following:
  • OCR error correction for users of the National Library of Australia's online newspaper collection, Trove: http://trove.nla.gov.au/
  • Citizen science project GalaxyZoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ and ZooTeach 'Where educators can share high quality lesson plans & resources that compliment the Zooniverse citizen science projects' http://www.zooteach.org/age/16%20to%2019+
  • Many other citizen projects are available on the Zooniverse site https://www.zooniverse.org/ or citizen science portals like http://scistarter.com/.
  • Art tagging and identification project Your Paintings Tagger http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/
  • Brooklyn Museum's Tag! You're It art tagging game http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
• Review and compare projects for transcribing historic records: OldWeather http://www.oldweather.org/ and What's on the Menu http://menus.nypl.org/. What differences did you notice, and what impact do they have on you as a potential transcriber?
• Try transcribing some records on Herbaria@home http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/ and Notes from Nature http://www.notesfromnature.org/. How easy was it to get started and complete a record in each project? Based on your experience, which types of users are the projects designed for?

Suggested Reading

• Howe, Jeff. “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” Wired Magazine, June 2006. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds_pr.html.
• Mia Ridge. “Frequently Asked Questions About Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage.” Open Objects, June 3, 2012. https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2012/06/frequently-asked-questions-about.html.
• Rebecca Frost Davis. “Crowdsourcing, Undergraduates, and Digital Humanities Projects.” Rebecca Frost Davis: Liberal Education in a Networked World, September 3, 2012. http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/crowdsourcing-undergraduates-and-digital-humanities-projects/.
• Cohen, Patricia. “For Bentham and Others, Scholars Enlist Public to Transcribe Papers.” The New York Times, December 27, 2010, sec. Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/books/28transcribe.html?ref=humanities20.