Apologies for the time it’s taken me to get back to this after our book sprint…

To clarify my understanding – you’ll have some digital and some physical photos, and different activities around them – in-person, synchronous and co-located; and online, individual and possibly asynchronous? If so, is one of the main distinctions between the two…[Read more]

We have two new calls for participation! Find out why we’re doing these surveys and how the results will be used at https://collectivewisdomproject.org.uk/we-want-to-hear-from-you/

To participate, follow the links below. Our ‘Case Study’ survey is designed for practitioners, while our ‘Volunteer Voice’ survey is designed for people who have take…[Read more]

We try to address the first question in our monthly webinars, talking about selecting materials, finding volunteers, creating task instructions, and keeping people motivated.

A rough recording (the plumber interrupts partway through) of our December webinar is recorded at https://youtu.be/xdy64yZbPHs?t=469 and the first 22 minutes from the…[Read more]

A question that was close to my heart this month – what advice would you give to someone in the lead up to launching an online project? What might I have forgotten to do or set up?

And what’s different when you’re launching a new phase of a project versus launching an entirely new project?

I noticed this question from Nina Janz some time ago, and I’ve (finally) shared it as I think it’s reasonably common in some fields:

‘I am looking for any standardisations or guidelines for transcriptions (online) in e.g. #crowdsourcing projects – I would use ISAD(G) – but it includes more titles, other than full-text transcripts’

My initial…[Read more]

This question of commonly-seen tasks is one of the hardest ones for me, as a practitioner, to wrap my head around in terms of how to convey information in a useful way. For example, it’s *so* helpful to be able to point to a project using a similar type of data, with a similar goal, and say, “Here’s how this team did it, here’s what their output…[Read more]

Thinking about it, one of the challenges for people thinking about crowdsourcing ideas for the first time is understanding whether their idea is similar to established patterns, or if it’s novel.

Platforms tend to cater to projects that match common patterns of tasks, though each has variations in how they approach it. Entirely new or novel tasks…[Read more]

Common platforms include:

• The Zooniverse Project Builder
• FromThePage
• Scripto + Omeka
• Pybossa

This is only a starting point and doesn’t begin to address the strengths and affordances of each platform, or consider the other systems you’ll need around the platform to manage data going in and out.

The following is a bit of a brain dump of things I tend to say in conversations about crowdsourcing projects, based on my academic research and practical experience. I should really just dig out my teaching slides as they’re designed to anticipate common questions, but in the spirit of ‘the perfect being the enemy of the good’ I’m going to start…[Read more]

Thinking back over previous conversations and unpicking some of the assumptions people bring to them, I’ve kick-started with some questions I’ve heard a few times. I’d love to know which ones resonate, and more importantly, what questions you’d add:

• How do I manage data quality?
• Is the overhead of picking and figuring out a platform worth it?…

[Read more]

Obviously this has all been postponed – we had a backup date in October but at this stage it’s too difficult to make any definite plans.

Thanks, Ben! I’d certainly agree with your assessment above.

We’re easing into some audio transcription projects this year on Zooniverse (which is very exciting!), but there’s still a ton of work to be done. I know I’d love to hear more about other’s experiences (you all are starting some audio efforts on FtP, if you’ve not already done so, yes?)…[Read more]