Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage workshop

Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage

Mia Ridge, @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

Fondren Library, Rice University, 7 March 2016

Overview

• What• Why • Who

• Emerging best practice

• Exercises - try and discuss

http://museumgam.es

Hands up!

• Do you work with: – Text– Images– Audio/video– Objects– Stories / memories / knowledge?

• Does your mission include education, outreach or engagement?

• Does you work with volunteers? Students?

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

Asking the public to help with tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge.

The activities and/or goals should be inherently rewarding.

Basically...

Transforming input content into output content ...via a powerful purpose and / or enjoyable

tasks that people want to help you with

Crowdsourcing and related terms

• User-generated content• Human computation• Citizen science, citizen history, citizen

humanities• Academic (e.g. humanities) crowdsourcing• Community-sourcing, nichesourcing• Cognitive surplus• 'the wisdom of crowds'

• 19th Century natural history collecting

• 1849 Smithsonian weather observation project

• 1857, 1879 Oxford English Dictionary appeals

•WWII Soldiers given a Field Collector's Manual in Natural History by the US Museum of Natural History

James Murray, editor, OED, with contributor slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:James-Murray.jpg

Crowdsourcing before the web

What is crowdsourcing?

reCAPTCHA

Heritage crowdsourcing examples

National Library of Australia: Trove

178 million lines of text corrected...

...rewards reinforce motivation

FamilySearch

Transcribe Bentham

Art UK Tagger

http://artuk.org/tagger/

PCF Image Recognition

https://newspapers.ushmm.org/

Exercise: compare front pages

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/TryCrowdsourcing

Compare pairs of sites: how good is the front page at making you want to participate in a project?

More examples

British Library Georeferencer

http://www.bl.uk/maps/

British Library LibCrowds

http://www.libcrowds.com/

British Library LibCrowds

http://www.libcrowds.com/

Reading Experience Database

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/

10 Most Wanted

Translation - Duolingo

Micropasts photo-masking

Example outputs

• Links between content (relationships)

• Ratings/Votes• Tags• Corrections• Transcriptions• Descriptions• Geo-coordinates

• Images, multimedia• Game levels• Research• Object identification• Family records• Objects, documents• Personal experiences,

memories

Questions?

Why crowdsourcing?

Why crowdsourcing in GLAMs?*

• Digitisation backlog: collections are big, resources are small

GLAMs = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums

Why crowdsourcing in GLAMs?

• Fix the 'semantic gap', enhance discoverability


• Access external specialist expertise


• Support needs of scholarly researchers e.g. participant transcription, DIY digitisation


• Create engaging experiences for the public, meaningful forms of participation


• Create environments for learning skills - palaeography, classification, contextualisation, humanistic or scientific analysis

Who contributes and why?

Who participates in crowdsourcing?

• People who are passionate about your subject / people who like doing the task you're offering

• Super-volunteers and lots of other people• Amateurs, professionals, 'pro-ams'• People who can't volunteer in regular hours or

at your venues

Super-contributors and passers-by

http://blog.oldweather.org

Motivations for participation

• Altruistic– helping to provide an accurate record of local

history• Intrinsic– reading 18thC handwriting is an enjoyable puzzle

or they're interested in the subject• Extrinsic– an academic collecting a quote from a primary

source

Extrinsic motivations

http://gwap.com

Intrinsic motivations for participation

• fun• the pleasure in doing

hobbies• the enjoyment in learning• mastering new skills,

practicing existing skills• recognition• community• passion for the subject

State Library of Queensland, Australiahttps://secure.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/3198305152/

Motivations and Galaxy ZooI am interested in astronomy 46%

I enjoy looking at the beautiful galaxy images 16

I can meet other people with similar interests 6

I am excited to contribute to original scientific research 22

I can look at galaxies that few people have seen before 8

I had a lot of fun categorising the galaxies 11

I am happy to help 7

I find the site and forums helpful in learning about astronomy 10

I am interested in science 4

I find Galaxy Zoo to be a useful resource for teaching other people 2

I am amazed by the vast scale of the universe 24

I am interested in the Galaxy Zoo project 8

Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage with Mia Ridge and Ben Brumfield at HILT

Motivations and Your Paintings TaggerI am interested in paintings 85.5%

I like working with people with similar interests 12.3

I am excited to be contributing to research into paintings 60.8

I can look at paintings that few people have seen before 50.5

I have fun categorising the paintings 55

I am happy to help with a national project like Your Paintings 76.3

I find Tagger helpful in learning about paintings 45.6

I find Tagger to be a useful resource for teaching other people 15.7

I am impressed by the wide range of the national collection of paintings 51.5

Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage with Mia Ridge and Ben Brumfield at HILT

Motivations as design guide

People crave:• satisfying work to do• the experience of being

good at something• time spent with people

we like• the chance to be a part

of something bigger(Jane McGonigal, 2009)

Questions?

Designing crowdsourcing projects

Exercise: try projects

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/TryCrowdsourcingHow clear was the purpose of the project? • Were the steps to complete the task clear? • How enjoyable was the task? • Did the reward (if any) feel appropriate? • Did you notice any friction or barriers?• Did the site anticipate your questions about

the tasks?

Concepts for reviewing projects• The 'call to action'

– Is the first step toward participating obvious?– Is the type of task, source material and output obvious?

• Probable audience– Can you tell who the project wants to reach?– Does text trigger their motivations for starting, continuing?– How are they rewarded?– Are there any barriers to their participation?

• Data input and data produced– What kinds of tasks create that data?– How are contributions validated?

• How productive, successful overall?

Designing crowdsourcing projects

• Interface and interaction design

• Project design

Interface design for crowdsourcing

• Demonstrate a close match between the crowdsourcing project and the mission of the organisation running it

• Show, don't tell - let people see the impact of their contributions

• 'Validate procrastination' - give people an altruistic excuse to spend time on your tasks

Interface design for crowdsourcing

• Design for 'super taggers' and for people who do just one or two tasks

• Design different tasks for different contexts

Smithsonian 'mini projects'

Designing for motivation

• Match 'microcopy' messages to motivations• Match tasks and rewards to motivations• Anticipate which motivations might change

over course of a project

Simple tasks as stepping stones

http://www.fossilfinder.org/

Designing for on-going participation

• Support increasing mastery• Promote participants to new skills, new roles

within project• Support emergence of a community

NYPL 'What's on the Menu?'

Design for participation

• Make it easy for people to do the right thing• Scaffold the experience: tightly defined tasks,

reduce uncertainty about quality of contribution, provide feedback on progress

Design for 'flow'

• Clear sense of goals• Feedback on progress towards goals• Skills matched to challenge• Attention focused

on task• 'in the moment'• Not worried

about external factors

Exercise: lessons from game design

Go to http://git.io/2048Spend 2 minutes trying it out

Did you understand what to do?Did you want to keep playing?

Moral: start with the simplest task possible

Exercise: lessons from game design

Inspiration from casual games

• Easy-to-learn game-play• Simple controls• 'Forgiving' game-play with low risk of failure• Carefully managed complexity levels with a

shallow learning curve, guidance through early levels, and inclusive, accessible themes

• Sense of rapid progress and achievement

Inspiration from casual games

• Build any tests for skill or experience requirements into the interface

• Build tutorials for new skills into application at the point where its needed; provide good feedback on actions

Questions?

Project design

• Plan to store and process results from crowdsourcing

• Allow time for community interaction and marketing

• Design projects that contribute to your engagement strategy and digitisation goals

• Release early and often (if you can)

• Reality check your plans

Marketing and outreach

• Call to action and tagline should explain what's unique about your project

• Start with what people already love and share about your collections

• Updates as outreach– Achievements, progress towards goals– Highlight participant discoveries, questions

#party host

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856

Crowdsourcing as hosting a party

Task ecosystems

http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/

The growth of platforms

Exercise: planning crowdsourcing

• Who already loves and/or uses your collections?• What motivates them? What rewards can you

design to match their motivations?• Which material needs what kind of work?• Do any existing platforms meet most of your needs?• What potential barriers could you turn into tasks?• How will you resource community interaction?• How would a project support your mission,

engagement strategy and digitisation goals?

Thank you!

Mia Ridge @mia_outDigital Curator, British Library

Knowledge Exchange Event & MGS Digital Transformation Network meeting, 2 December 2, 2015 The Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum