Michael Haley Goldman
Future Projects
2016

Museums, libraries, and archives share the
commonality of stuff - lots of stuff,
abundance.
Roy Rosenzweig formulated this
question in an article for the American
Historical Review in 2003
“Historians, in fact, may be
facing a fundamental
paradigm shift from a culture
of scarcity to a culture of
abundance.”
Museums, libraries, archives, public
historians, etc are facing this same shift.
Stat from Mary Meeker in 2014, over 1.8
billion images were being uploaded and
shared every day on just four of the top
social media sites.

To put that in perspective. Our stuff is
not so big but we are still confronted
with more content being digitized than
we can handle by our existing
practices and staff allotments.
Functionally, our content is Big By
Our Standards (BBOS) - so we will
still need to understand, apply, and
expand on the techniques of big data
to the work of museums and museum
collections.
1.8 Billion Images
uploaded to 4 social
media services daily.
You are here.

Curation - funny word, going through a bit of
an identity crises at the moment. Two sides
of the coin - in our museum they are entirely
different functions: description and
interpretation.
Photo from P C

USHMM creates exhibitions and runs
educational programs.

USHMM actively collects broad material
evidence of the Holocaust - archival
documentation, objects, oral histories, film,
etc.

The USHMM hosts workshops, conferences
as well as running academic fellowships for
undergraduates to senior scholars.

The USHMM develops leadership programs
for police, judges, the military, and other
groups that play an important role in
maintaining democracy.

The USHMM also works to better understand
and prevent genocide today. Programs
reach leaders and policy makers in the US
and internationally.

Crowdsourcing - as a technique within
cultural institutions (not perfect but well
developed)
Museums have been flirting with the crowd
since AT least 2006 (some would say much
earlier)
Crowdsourcing has often been used to
support the curation task to create
descriptions for objects in collections (the
descriptions side of the coin).

Mechanical Turk sums up a lot of what we
imagine work done by the crowd to be -
something that computers SHOULD be able
to do but can’t yet.

Microsoft’s Captionbot made public in April
2016 shows there is continuing progress on
computer description but it is still not quite
right. This image is Nazi propagandist Julius
Streicher at Nuremberg - even if visually
described correctly it might not tell you much
about the contents of the image.

We love crowds…
...we have been impressed by the great
crowdsourcing and transcriptions projects
that have been created for museums,
archives, and other cultural institutions.
(examples from the Steve Project to
Transcribe Bentham to the SI Transcription
Center and on and on…
Also note the great critique of the term Crowd
Sourcing by Stuart Dunn.
We Crowds
Photo Adapted from Georg Sander

In cooperation with Ancestry.com - the
Museum’s World Memory project has
transcribed over 1 million records from
Holocaust documents.

The Museum also helped developed the
Early Warning Project that taps into a crowd
of experts to draw attention to areas at risk of
genocide.

And the Museum has done a lot of other
small projects like this tagging experiment
with Tiltfactor’s Metadata Games.

Citizen History for us (and I don’t know if we
were the first ones to use it this way) was a
direct reference to Citizen Science projects
as they were developed by groups like the
Cornell Lab of O and as now can be found
through sites like Zooniverse…
From Citizen Science we borrowed some
ideas for the Lodz Children Project, most
importantly:
- starting from the research question -
not the collection,
- placing a community manager at the
center of the project, and
- making an educator (and educational
goals) integral to the project.
Photo: Peter Lindberg

We didn’t call our “Children of the Lodz
Ghetto” project a crowdsourcing project. As
Elissa Frankle and others have talked about
in the past - we’ve described that project as a
“Citizen History” project - soufflé for
everyone! This stresses that the project is
geared towards our educational and research
goals not archival/collections needs.

All of our previous work led to the 2016
launch of a full fledged (nationwide) Citizen
History project called “History Unfolded.”
This project asks the public to help us better
understand how Americans understood the
events that we now call the Holocaust by
capturing how events were reported in their
local news.

Research and
Educational
Goals
Collections and
Access Goals
Volunteers
Quality results
Active communities
Outreach
Crowdsourcing Citizen History
Citizen History and Crowdsourcing
lots of overlap
Summary of differences
of starting point for
Crowdsourcing and
Citizen History for the
USHMM. They have
similar results but very
different goals.

Citizen History, as a concept, is at some level
a response to the need for creating
interpretation of massive collections in a less
traditional way. Historians, educators, and
experts are not interpreting everything but
are, instead, creating a scaffold where joint
meaning making occurs with the public. (This
addresses the curation as interpretation side
of the coin).
We will need many other ideas for creating
open ended interpretation environments with
the big data that we are creating. These
ideas will not cede meaning making to the
masses nor give sole authority to the experts.
These will be spaces of participatory,
navigated construction.
Photo: Martin Griffiths

Again - all rooted in the stuff of museums,
libraries, and archives.

Thank you - comments and questions
appreciated.
End
Photo: British Library