1. Pratt Institute-King’s College London Symposium, London, 26th June 2015
Public humanities: from
crowdsourcing to community-
sourcing
Mark Hedges
Departmentof DigitalHumanities
King’s CollegeLondon

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Some Definitions …

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Definitions of crowdsourcing
[I]t doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down
the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are
connected to the network … the labor isn’t always free, but it
costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not
outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing. [Howe 2006]

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[A] hybrid model that blends the transparent and democratizing
elements of open source into a feasible model for doing profitable
business, all facilitated through the web [Brabham 2008]
Definitions of crowdsourcing

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Definitions of crowdsourcing
Most successful crowdsourcing projects are not about large
anonymous masses of people. ... They are about inviting
participation from interested and engaged members of the public.
These projects can continue a long standing tradition of
volunteerism and involvement of citizens in the creation and
continued development of public goods [Owens 2012]
[T]he process of leveraging public participation in or
contributions to projects and activities. [Dunn and Hedges
2012]

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The Business of Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing as Business: MTurk
Example tasks:
• Tagging images
• Subtitling (speech -> text)
• OCR correction
• CAPTCHA cracking
• ...

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Visits the tombs

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Academic Crowdsourcing
in the Humanities

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A schematic view
Asset Process Output
Task

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Models of Engagement
Amazon MTurk:
• Open recruitment
• Generic (or no) interest
• Micropayment
• Engagement?
• Community?
• Open recruitment
• Broad interest (initially)
• Various rewards
• Increased engagement
• Loose/multiple communities
• Some central support
• Focused recruitment
• Very specific interest/expertise
• Close engagement
• Close community
• Strong central support
Academic crowdsourcing models

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Motivations
• Not financial (they are not being paid)
• Intrinsic interest it the subject matter (or process):
• Broad/general interest
• Specific/personal interest
• Opportunity to share interest with others
• More extrinsic:
• Wish to contribute to something worthwhile
• (Benign) competition
• “social” rewards: rankings, standing in the community,
credited in publications

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Specialist knowledge
Size of ‘the crowd’
Collaborative tagging
Cataloguing
Levels of Expertise

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‘Super-contributors’ and the long tail
Small number of contributors
do many transcriptions
Large number of participants do
small number of transcriptions

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Groups form around a:
• Topic
• Subset of the source assets
• Practice/activity
Roles develop as result of:
• Activities undertaken
• Expertise and interests
• Conscious decision
Self-organisation vs top-down
Peer production of research
Self-organisation and ‘Peer Production’

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Communities and Quality (Assurance)
• Perceived potential for low quality of crowdsourced info:
• Professional (expert?) vs amateur
• e.g. criticisms of Wikipedia
• Automated QA:
• e.g. replication of tasks, comparison of results
• Assumes measurable correctness
• Community-based, collaborative QA:
• Via collaboration and discussion
• Importance of clear criteria

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Community knowledge creation
Communities can provide very specific contributions:
• Interests and enthusiasms:
• e.g. maps, family history
• Specific (unique) objects/artefacts:
• e.g. ephemera, photographs, diaries
• Knowledge/Information:
• e.g. about family members, places
• Experience/expertise:
• e.g. relating to former occupation

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Subject interest, enthusiasm

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Unique artefacts

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Unique knowledge

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Specialist experience

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Outcomes for participants
• Creation of communities
• Communities forming around question/topic
• Technical/practical skills:
• ICT skills (e.g. wiki editing), paleography
• Domain knowledge:
• e.g. about family members, places
• Specialised research skills:
• Text editing, paleography, collaborative projects

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To sum up …
• Communities rather than crowds
• Self-organisation rather than hierarchy
• Engagement rather than anonymity
• Collaboration rather than independence

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Thank you!
mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk