1. Beyond 'Long tails'
and 'Super users'
Reflections on distributed collaboration and
'crowdsourcing'
2. What's in a name?
• Crowdsourcing (with or without a hyphen)
• Peer production
• Human computation
• Social computing
• Citizen science or citizen humanities
3. What meanings are we
trying to capture?
• Is it the distributed nature of production or
collaboration?
• Is it the digital nature of the communication
involved?
• Is it the openness of the call to participate?
• Is it the social relationship between the parties
involved?
4.
5.
6. • Are the "super users" more likely to be important to
citizen humanities than the "long tail"? - Dunn and
Hedges (2012)
• Why is important to interrogate the terms we are
using and the underlying assumptions they are
based on?
• What does this binary reveal about the nature of the
activities we are analysing?
7.
8. Some possible comparators
• Labour markets (Uber, Taskrabbit, MTurk)
• Commons production (FLOSS, Wikipedia)
• Social movements (Occupy)
• Computational systems (reCAPTCHA, Duolingo)
9. Significance
• Valuation of new companies in online labour market sector:
Uber raised $1.2bn just for new Chinese operations
Taskrabbit $40m in venture funding
• Wikipedia: 4,963,037 articles in English version, 26m users
of whom 121,000 are active, 1200 admins)
• Occupy protests: 951 protests in 82 countries (Guardian,
17 Oct 2011)
• ReCAPTCHA: now owned by Google, millions of use
instances everyday, feeds into book digitisation, machine
learning research and map correction
10. Key questions
• How good is the 'fit' between the label and what we
are analysing?
• What are the social, economic and ethical
implications of using these labels to describe or
analyse citizen humanities projects?
11. Characteristics
• Labour markets: employer buys a workers' time, rather than
owning their body - neoliberal twist on this in most online labour
markets (everyone is boss and no-one is allegedly exploited)
• Peer production: the process is disassociated from property or
contract, (Benkler), although in reality exists in symbiosis with
market systems
• Social movements: purposive, network-shaped, multi-headed,
can be mass information production and distribution systems
• Computational systems: humans as processors, run slower
cycles and require motivation (because they have free will), but
can be integrated as components of computational system
15. Conclusions
• Cannot escape the wider context in which citizen
humanities takes place
• Design of citizen humanities projects will be
affected by all these different ways of
conceptualising and organising human endeavour
• As well as fitting into the practice of the various
scholarly research communities and institutions we
engage with
