[Mia Ridge]

Call for book sprint participants, April 2020, ‘From crowdsourcing to digitally-enabled participation: the state of the art in collaboration, access, and inclusion for cultural heritage institutions’.

I’m excited to announce that we – Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter (Library of Congress) and Sam Blickhan (Zooniverse) – have been awarded an AHRC UK-US Partnership Development Grant. Our overarching goals are:

• To foster an international community of practice in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage (if you’re reading this, that probably includes you!)
• To capture and disseminate the state of the art and promote knowledge exchange in crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation
• To set a research agenda and generate shared understandings of unsolved or tricky problems that could lead to future funding applications

 

We’ve written a blog post that explains how we’re planning to achieve those goals – New project! ‘From crowdsourcing to digitally-enabled participation: the state of the art in collaboration, access, and inclusion for cultural heritage institutions’ – and more importantly, another post on how you can get involved – Call for participants: April 2020 book sprint on the state of the art in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage.

We’re holding a five day collaborative ‘book sprint‘ (or writing workshop) at the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture from 19 – 24th April 2020. Working with up to 12 other collaborators, we’ll write a high-quality book that provides a comprehensive, practical and authoritative guide to crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation projects in the cultural heritage sector. We want to provide an effective road map for cultural institutions hoping to use crowdsourcing for the first time and a resource for institutions already using crowdsourcing to benchmark their work.

Could you be one of those collaborators? We’re looking for book sprint participants who are enthusiastic, experienced and engaged, with expertise at any point in the life cycle of crowdsourcing and digital participation. Your expertise might have been gained through hands-on experience on projects or by conducting research. We have a generous definition of ‘digitally-enabled participation’, including not-entirely-digital volunteering projects around cultural heritage collections, and activities that go beyond typical collection-centric ‘crowdsourcing’ tasks like transcription, classification and description. Got questions? Please email digitalresearch@bl.uk!

How to apply

1. Read Call for participants: April 2020 book sprint on the state of the art in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
2. Read the Book Sprint FAQs to make sure you’re aware of the process and commitment required
3. Fill in this short Google Form by midnight GMT February 21st

We’ll review applications and let people know by February 25th, 2020.

If you can’t make the book sprint but would still like to contribute, we’ve got you covered! We’ll publish the first version of the book online for comment and feedback. Book sprints can’t accommodate remote participation, so this is our best way of including the vast amounts of expertise not in the room.

You can sign up to the British Library’s crowdsourcing newsletters for updates, or keep an eye on discussions here. If you’re interested in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, I’d also recommend the very low-traffic JISCMail discussion list, https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CROWDSOURCING

• This topic was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Mia Ridge. Reason: typo
• This topic was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Mia Ridge. Reason: final text

[Mia Ridge]

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.

[Mia Ridge]

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 taken part in crowdsourcing, citizen science, citizen history, digital / online volunteer projects. Please feel free to fill out one or both, depending on your personal experience, and share with someone else who might wish to contribute. Thank you in advance for sharing your experiences.

Collective Wisdom ‘Volunteer Voice’ survey: https://forms.gle/vMyUbuf2CrkTfXfF9

Collective Wisdom ‘Case Study’ survey: https://forms.gle/gZjkUtYKhLo8wGN1A

[Mia Ridge]

Save the dates!

We’re starting planning in earnest for the workshop event that rounds off our project. Meghan has written a ‘save the date’ post that sets out the basics and some possible topics https://collectivewisdomproject.org.uk/save-the-date-collective-wisdom-workshop-20-22-october-2021/ including:

• Evidencing mental health and other benefits of participation in crowdsourcing, building on work on volunteering and mental health, social prescribing, etc and designing to maximise positive impact
• Human computation systems with humanistic values, focus on volunteer experience
• Patterns and workflows for engaging tasks that bring data or research where it’s most needed – practical realities of nice-to-have data vs hardcore discoverability
• Learning from other practical and theoretical fields e.g. physical volunteering; CSCW; social prescribing
• Better links between different fields of practice (volunteering, community archives, etc) and academic research (crowd science, CSCW, etc)

[Author]

Posts