Alexandra Eveleigh

2. Engagement Strategies for
Crowdsourcing the
Humanities: are they Ethical?
Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing
for the Humanities in the 21st Century
9th-10th September 2015
Alexandra Eveleigh
a.eveleigh@westminster.ac.uk

3. Crowding out the Archivist? Implications of online
user participation for archival theory and practice

4. The Triumphal Rhetoric of
Archives 2.0
– Active engagement of (new) users
– Co-creation of historical meaning
– Institution as primary beneficiary
– Expectation of committed, sustained participation
Library of Congress, flickr Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179137913/ No known copyright restrictions

5. The Participant Experience Framework
‘Success is down to the participants’ (P24)

6. Competitive Participation
Participation stimulated and rewarded by
competition against others, towards the pursuit
of extrinsic, fixed goal(s), possibly short-lived in
duration.
And I would see, oh somebody’s got this many more than me;
I’m gonna work really hard and then I’ll beat them! And oh, I’m
really close to them! If I put in another half hour I’ll beat them,
kinda thing. So I think that helped really, putting in extra effort
and getting more data transcribed. (OW4)

7. Or the exploitation of labour?
I think that it is no good that
promotion to captain depends on
transcribed weather reports. Events
are not taken into account; people
are interested only in how many
weather reports they transcribe.
(OW-S)
Well, one of my colleagues actually
said that he wouldn’t want it to be
too successful because he’d be put
out of a job. (P95)

8. Or Taylorism 2.0?*
It was very kind of factory type work. (P28)
There seems to be some sort of competition with the champion
with the most entries. And I think that’s rather silly. It could
almost be a reason not to do too much. I don’t want to be on the
top of the list, I just… like, some… you know, have you got any
work or something?! Well, it looks as if you’re someone who’s…
if you do a lot of entries and [are] high--‐up in the ranking, it’s
like you’re not doing anything else all day. So you probably
don’t have a job or no friends. (P37)
DeWinter et al. (2014) ‘Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, scientific management and the capitalist appropriation of play’ Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 6(2), 109-127

9. Collaborative Participation
Participation in an open-ended cause that
requires dedicated contributor cognitive effort,
sustained by social interaction related to shared
community interests.
I really enjoy the community in the forum as well. It’s great to
work as part of a team that’s all interested in the same thing and
more than happy to share experience, knowledge and research
with each other. One of the things that keeps me coming back
is how friendly and supportive everyone is. (OW-S)

10. Or a clique? An intrusion of privacy?
I became very disillusioned with the pages of banal and historical
chat when trying to read and search the forum. (OW-S)
No doubt the sharing of access problems or useful search
information can be helpful at times, but the grunt work really has
to be done alone. (P151)

11. Crowding out the Archivist? Implications of online
user participation for archival theory and practice

12. Targeted Participation
Directed participation for personal challenge,
amusement or diversion; purposeful but often
sporadic or intermittent:
Curiosity and a love of knowledge are my main motivations;
knowing that one’s work is of high calibre is a strong motivator as
well, but there’s no need for excessive external validation to get
the enjoyment from that. I don’t have enough time to make OW an
important social community, so it’s more a matter of contributing to
something that happens to be enjoyable.
(OW-S)
It’s basically idle time that I would normally be spending checking
my email or playing a Flash game, but I feel as if I’m contributing
to something important. (OW7)

13. Or addiction?
When you’ve finished one scan, the next one automatically
comes up. So that makes it very difficult to click away, to stop.
You always want to do, oh, I can do this one. Or just one more.
So that’s a very good motivator. (P37)
It is a great displacement activity and has helped me through
redundancy and bereavement. It is both gratifying and worrying
to realise that you know more about the ship you are Captain of
than anyone else alive. (OW-S)

14. Immersive Participation
A personal and emotive journey of exploration,
impelled by curiosity and an empathy with history:
The ‘real’ story that these logs imply is/was as hypnotically fascinating
as any form of fiction or non-fiction. (OW-S)
It opens up your world and your mind. It allows you to be able to, you
know, get different perspectives on something that you know you may
not have understood or known about before. Or even things in your
everyday life, it can open up in a new way where you can see it
difficult. You know, it allows you, takes you on different paths, and
that, you know, gives you new adventures to do in your everyday life
that otherwise you may not have even considered doing. (OW6)

15. Or an ethical dilemma?
I found an ancestry tree for the family. The owner doesn’t mention
my 2xgt.uncle, but has assumed his daughter’s stepfather was the
birth father, listing grandparents and other relations who are
nothing to do with her. Perhaps she was never told of her father,
grew up believing her stepfather’s family was her own, and may
have passed down happy family memories which my facts could
seriously affect. On the other hand, I’ve found my own family
‘secrets’ when researching, and even if initially unpleasant, I’ve
been pleased to find them, as they’ve ultimately solved various
mysteries. So is there an argument that her descendants should
know the truth, and I should contact the tree owner? Or should I
follow my instincts and leave well alone?
(http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/forum/topic10829.html)

16. Towards Ethical Crowdsourcing in the Humanities
– The trap: thinking crowdsourcing is ethical
because the work is unpaid or enjoyable
– Accepting differentiated goals
– More goal-oriented, less task-oriented
– ‘Less game, more play’ (DeWinter)
– Extensible, flexible, adaptable – shaped by the
participants