crowdsourcing digital humanities

Karolina Badzmierowska

@karolinabadz

badzmiek@tcd.ie

Emma Clarke

@Clarke__Emma

clarkee8@tcd.ie

Crowdsourcing a DH project

M.Phil in DH – TCD1 October 2014

What

is

crowdsourcing?

Wikipedia entry for

“Crowdsourcing”:

● 902 editors

● 1802 revisions

● edits made by the top

10% of editors: 745

(41.3%)

● page viewed 50685

times in the last 30

days

● a monster map of

Britain's trees

● GOAL: to record the

trees near you and to

find out how they

benefit the local

environment

● 48,612 trees

● records from public

records and citizen

foresters

http://www.treezilla.org/

Its aim is to engage the public

in the online transcription

of original and unstudied manuscript papers

written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832),

the great philosopher and reformer.

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

• Benthamometer for

progress update

• Hall of Fame and Top

Contributors

collecting all the names

of places and features in

Wales from the Ordnance

Survey’s six-inch to a mile

maps of c. 1900

http://www.cymru1900wales.org/

“(...) there is here a huge

potential to tap into local

knowledge and memory”

https://www.zooniverse.org/

The Zooniverse is home to the Internet's

largest, most popular and most successful

citizen science projects

200,000 publicly owned oil

paintings online

Each painting will be tagged

many times by members of

the public, and algorithms

behind the scenes will

calculate which tags are likely

to be the most accurate

http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/

Letters of 1916 project

Project launched on 27 September 2013

Timespan of the letters: 1 Nov 1915 - 31 Oct 1916

Historical significance in the “Decade of Centenaries (2012 - 2022)”

How many people do you think work on the Letters 1916 project?

● fear of the unknown

● copyright issues

● cost / lack of resources for

digitisation

● planning their own 1916 project

How did the Letters of 1916 Project

get from its launch (27 Sept 2013)

to where it is today?

Amy Sample Ward

“Who is the crowd?”

If projects in this area wish to have

‘impact’, as well as be impacted

upon, they need to reach out and

recognize that the public wish to

be collaborated with.

(Dunn)

Put a mechanism

in place for your

contributors to

talk to each other,

as well as to you

(Dunn)

Philip Costello retired in

2012, having completed 40

years in the Public Service.

He is married to Catherine

and they have four children

and two grandchildren.

Since his retirement he has

been volunteering at

various festivals in Dublin,

as well as the Letters 1916

Project.

Super-Phil

A good crowdsourcing project should build any

necessary data validation into the project (Ridge)

Kapin, Allyson, and Amy Sample Ward. Social Change Anytime Everywhere: How to

Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and

Engage Your Community. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Karolina Badzmierowska

@karolinabadz

badzmiek@tcd.ie

Emma Clarke

@Clarke__Emma

clarkee8@tcd.ie