• Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities

    Author(s):
    Melissa Terras (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Subject(s):
    Digital communications, Digital humanities, Interactive multimedia--Design
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    #socialmedia, #crowdsourcing, #publicengagement, #cocreation, #volunteering, Digital communication, Digital history, Interactive media design
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6178W
    Abstract:
    As Web 2.0 technologies changed the World Wide Web from a read-only to a co-creative digital experience, a range of commercial and non-commercial platforms emerged to allow online users to contribute to discussions and use their knowledge, experience, and time to build online content. Alongside the widespread success of collaboratively produced resources such as Wikipedia came a movement in the cultural and heritage sectors to trial crowdsourcing - the harnessing of online activities and behaviour to aid in large-scale ventures such as tagging, commenting, rating, reviewing, text correcting, and the creation and uploading of content in a methodical, task-based fashion (Holley 2010) - to improve the quality of, and widen access to, online collections. Building on this, within Digital Humanities there have been attempts to crowdsource more complex tasks traditionally assumed to be carried out by academic scholars: such as the accurate transcription of manuscript material. This chapter aims to survey the growth and uptake of crowdsourcing for culture and heritage, and more specifically, within Digital Humanities. It raises issues of public engagement and asks how the use of technology to involve and engage a wider audience with tasks that have been the traditional purview of academics can broaden the scope and appreciation of humanistic enquiry. Finally, it asks what this increasingly common public-facing activity means for Digital Humanities itself, as the success of these projects demonstrates the effectiveness of building projects for, and involving, a wide online audience.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Wiley-Blackwell
    Pub. Date:
    2016
    Book Title:
    A New Companion to Digital Humanities
    Author/Editor:
    Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., and Unsworth, J. (eds),
    Page Range:
    420 - 439
    ISBN:
    1118680642
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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