Beyond 'Long tails' and 'Super users'Reflections on distributed collaboration and

'crowdsourcing'

What's in a name?• Crowdsourcing (with or without a hyphen)

• Peer production

• Human computation

• Social computing

• Citizen science or citizen humanities

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?

• 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?

Some possible comparators

• Labour markets (Uber, Taskrabbit, MTurk)

• Commons production (FLOSS, Wikipedia)

• Social movements (Occupy)

• Computational systems (reCAPTCHA, Duolingo)

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

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?

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

Implications

requester / supervisor / manager / organiser

vs

worker / contributor / participant

Implications

expert / professional

vs

non-expert / amateur

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

raa43@cam.ac.uk Anne Alexander (Cambridge Digital Humanities Network / Ethics of Big Data Research Group)