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Reaching out: museums, crowdsourcing and participatory heritage
- 1. Reaching out: museums, crowdsourcing and participatory heritage Mia Ridge, @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library Museoalan Teemapäivät 2016 Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, September 2016
- 2. https://www.flickr.com/photos/statensarkiver/8975684669 The 'definitions' bit Crowdsourcing as participatory heritage Impact and challenges Key examples and guidelines for designing crowdsourcing projects
- 3. 'Museums with impact don't just happen'. https://www.flickr.com/photos/slsarkiva/7928863426/
- 4. What is crowdsourcing? https://www.flickr.com/photos/slsarkiva/7928955696/ Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, 2006: 'taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call'
- 5. What is crowdsourcing? https://www.flickr.com/photos/slsarkiva/7928955696/ Cognitive surplus (Clay Shirky): 'the spare processing power of millions of human brains' Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, 2006: 'taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call'
- 6. 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.
- 7. 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. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
- 8. Basically... Transforming input content into output content ...via a powerful purpose and / or enjoyable tasks that people want to help you with
- 9. Heritage crowdsourcing as volunteering https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/4659373140
- 12. 1857, 1879 Oxford English Dictionary appeals http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/02/james-murray/
- 13. Why ask the public to help?
- 16. Key examples and guidelines for designing crowdsourcing projects
- 17. reCAPTCHA
- 18. DigiTalkoot
- 19. NLA Trove: OCR correction http://trove.nla.gov.au/
- 22. NYPL 'What's on the Menu?' Tiny, enjoyable tasks
- 24. Simple tasks to build skills http://www.fossilfinder.org/
- 28. Niche projects are effective
- 29. Motivations as design guidelines Jane McGonigal - 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 State Library of New South Wales https://www.flickr.com/photos/29454428@N08/2880982738
- 30. Good text links to motivations 'With a few keystrokes, you could bring a family together' 'We know the names of these children; can you help us tell their stories?' 'Kill Time. Make History.' 'Historians need your help!'
- 35. Crowdsourcing as 'stepping stones' http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/
- 37. Communities of practice as 'social learning systems'
- 39. Challenges
- 40. The growth of platforms
- 42. Design is part of recruitment Onboarding, tutorials built into the interface Feedback on progress towards goals Skills matched to challenge Low risk of failure
- 43. Design for casual and super-contributors http://blog.oldweather.org
- 44. Task complexity vs audience size https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162650585
- 45. 'no plan survives contact with the crowd' With apologies to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
- 47. Planning a graceful exit https://www.flickr.com/photos/fylkesarkiv/4545543824
- 48. From 'for' to 'with'
- 49. #party host https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/5786204856 Crowdsourcing as hosting a party
- 50. Kiitos. Questions? Dr Mia Ridge @mia_out Digital Curator, British Library Museoalan Teemapäivät 2016 Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, September 2016
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for the invitation to speak.
- Today I'll look at crowdsourcing as a specific kind of participatory cultural heritage project, show you some key examples, look at potential impacts, and touch on the challenges that participatory projects pose for museums.
- 'Museums with impact don't just happen, they need to actively take the role in society by engaging people and fostering dialogue.' Important acknowledgement, so glad to see it in the programme. It enables shift in practice and attitude which in turn makes you more likely to succeed with participatory projects.
- Where it came from... Open call to unknown people sometimes scares people in cultural heritage. Problematic coining - not usually a crowd or outsourcing - but a bit late now. I've given two other ways of looking at it, both closer to hobbies, leisure activities.
- Find the outsourcing-based definition problematic. My definition – partly proscriptive as well as descriptive.
- No financial rewards so has to be rewarding.
- Those terms 'powerful purpose' and 'enjoyable tasks' are key.
- Better way of thinking about it. Leisure activity, sometimes at serious level. If you've worked with in-person volunteer or community programmes, you already have a lot of the skills needed to run a good crowdsourcing project.
- Digital tech offers serious advantages over in-person programmes. Not tied to venue opening hours or location; not limited by conservation issues once material is digitised. Allows you to reach thousands of people, or just a few specialists who might be anywhere in the world. Convenience for volunteers means they can fit it in around their lives. A few minutes here and there adds up, means people can take up hobbies sooner.
- This is an extreme example – transcribing genealogical records on a mobile. Small, fast tasks; how easy they are depends on the handwriting but that's part of the attraction.
- Lots of early examples of distributed tasks with public participation. OED realised task of compiling examples of words was beyond small committee, asked the 'reading public' for help. Task of compiling information from slips was huge, lots of manual work. Crowdsourcing as we know it has been transformed by technology, but not created by it. Tech enables huge scale, speed. The ability of digital technology to provide almost instant data gathering and feedback, automatic validation; the ability to rapidly reach both broad and niche groups through loose networks have all been particularly important.
- Digitisation backlog: collections are big, resources are small. Manually enhancing collections records is expensive and time-consuming. Very few orgs have the resources for digitisation of images, let alone full cataloguing or transcription. Image: The storage void of the new British Library National Newspaper Building at Boston Spa in West Yorkshire. Photo © Kippa Matthews
- Well-designed projects can help people discover new interests, communities, or just encourage them to have a brief moment of deeper engagement with cultural heritage
- Might be learning by following their own interests using heritage material, through discussion with others and with museum staff, or just through spending lots of time developing familiarity with material.
- Just enough to get us all on the same page. Moving from 'type what you see' to more complex tasks.
- You've all helped correct text (or transcribe audio)
- Joint project by National Library of Finland and Microtask, launched in 2011. Correct newspaper text, also built in game to check for errors. Love that it was based on the concept of collective effort.
- Designed to let people get on with correcting errors they'd come across when doing their work, but satisfying enough task that people do it for fun. Minimised barriers to participation.
- Your contribution makes a difference immediately… Effective design that makes correcting text a satisfying interaction. The user experience is further enhanced by the immediate appearance of the corrected text on the page (alongside the editing history). This shows participants the value of their contribution by making their corrections immediately available for the benefit of other users, reassures them that their work can be checked.
- Really focussed design. Altruistic and subject specialist motivation; clear sense of what to do next… Also topical content - if there are new menus, menus relevant to events (Superbowl, in this case); tantalising snippets of content... Low friction design - friction is anything that makes it harder or delays participation. While minimising friction, also look for points that might cause anxiety. Empathy for your participants is a huge design asset.
- Minimised everything not essential to the task on this interface. This tightly scaffolded user experience means low cognitive overhead, faster and more satisfying tasks. Excellent example of a 'microtask'.
- Complex task - marking up transcriptions in XML - on difficult source material. Has a small number of very productive super-taggers… manual validation creates backlog and delay in approving content reduces feelings of reward. Post to the blog about progress help make up for it. Media coverage helped - each round drew in a few contributors.
- Gives people a chance to get familiar with the material before trying other tasks
- Tagging – typing in words that describe what you see – can be useful and give people an excuse to spend time with collections. Immersion in images can be its own reward.
- The right material meets the right audience. Beautiful objects, intriguing puzzle. There are a lot of map fans in the world and they were eager to interact with the BL's collection.
- Through to more complex tasks. When asking people to contribute expertise or knowledge, can take longer for the right person to find the right question/object.
- Small - lots of milestones to celebrate. Lots of keywords to attract potential interest – places, dates, people, topics.
- Another way of looking at it.. Source: http://www.aam-us.org/resources/publications/museum-magazine/museums-as-happiness-engineers and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ9j7kIZuoQ&feature=plcp
- Match 'microcopy' messages to motivations. Demonstrate a close match between the crowdsourcing project and the mission of the organisation running it
- The number of tasks completed. To achieve this, must also have succeeded in letting people know about your project and providing an interface that lets enough of them get started on their first tasks. People will work towards metrics you provide, so be careful!
- You can also look at the number or type of people engaged in the tasks. This is often important for organisations whose mission is to reach the public, whether that's to give them an experience of contemporary science or access to their history through specific collections. The Zooniverse projects have reached well over a million people worldwide. Some of scientific projects might also look at the impact of publications on social media and in journals that result from their projects. Museums might look at the number of researchers who find their digitised collections.
- Finally, you can look at the number of people who are deeply engaged - people whose feelings or knowledge about the material or the underlying disciplines change to the extent that they change some aspect of their behaviour. There’s something about handwritten text that seems particularly likely to get people thinking about historic lives.
- In this example, people transcribing faunal specimen sheets realised that they were seeing the same handwriting on different cards and started to wonder about the people behind the collections. Collected examples, started to see relationships, compile biographies. http://herbariaunited.org/wiki/Harry_Corbyn_Levinge or http://herbariaunited.org/wiki/Augustin_Ley
- Old Weather is a 'Zooniverse' project that aims to extract weather information from historic ships logs for use by climate scientists. Zooniverse originally created forums to help answer questions when busy after launch; but turned out to provide place for wonderful discussion. Here volunteers have compiled detailed guides to understanding handwriting on particular ships
- At their best, participant forums become communities of practice, which in turn support learning. In CoPs, newcomers 'learn and acquire knowledge through participating in everyday activity with colleagues'. Online forums support many of the activities typical of communities of practice, including problem solving, making and answering requests for information, coordinating activities and undertaking documentation projects. Online communities of practice develop 'a shared repertoire of resources' including 'experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems'. While the original theoretical work on communities of practice involved in-person discussion, online communication, including social media, forums and discussion lists, similarly show many traces of the development of shared practices.
- Find balance between participants' interests and organisational goals. Sometimes participants get distracted by the task – that might be ok, or it might reduce productivity. Which do you value more? Need to design appropriate measures of success – not just things that are easy to count, but things that matter.
- Opportunity – easier than ever before to try it out! Less time thinking about tech; more time thinking about people.
- Design is important because lots of projects around; people will compare yours to others
- Design really matters, but museums aren’t always equipped to work on this. Finnish example! 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 = flow! 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
- Designing for a range of users can be difficult. Some people do a lot of the work, and a lot of people do some of the work. This represents all 16,400 people who have transcribed at least one page for Old Weather (back in 2012) Source: http://blog.oldweather.org/2012/09/05/theres-a-green-one-and-a-pink-one-and-a-blue-one-and-a-yellow-one/
- The more complex a task, the fewer people will have the skills and time to undertake it. (Break it into smaller tasks, ecosystem of tasks)
- Release early and often (if you can). Projects change once a community finds them. Allow time to update after launch as things will need to be tweaked and participants often have good ideas. Online projects aren’t like exhibitions – you need to keep working on them after launch.
- Getting material from crowdsourcing project into collections management systems, finding aids, etc, is often forgotten or delayed because it’s quite hard.
- With any luck, one day you will run out of content to crowdsource - what then? Where does your community go?
- Shift in attitude, from designing experiences for people to creating opportunities to work and learn together. 'Museums with impact don't just happen‘ – can mean deep changes for museum, need to rethink ways of working.
- Lesson – you can't just issue invitations, you have to stick around. Allow time for community interaction and marketing. Being a host takes time. Sometimes advise organisations not to do a crowdsourcing project if it doesn’t seem like they have resources / time to be with the community.