In the course readings this week, both Serge Noiret and Pierluigi Feliciati discuss the ways in which crowdsourcing are a fundamental part of digital public history. One of the themes that was emphasized in the readings – and that came up in discussion in class – was the concept of shared authority and the ways in which the public historian must navigate their role as an expert while working with publics for whom the history at hand is often deeply personal. In “Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content: The Raison d’Etre of Digital Public History,” Noiret relays that “it has been observed that whoever collaborates with a user generated project is directly interested or connected by their community issues and/or by the heritage crowdsourcing project.” (47)
The readings did not spend much time addressing the friction that could occur between involved members of the public and the historian, but a potential solution can still be found in Pierluigi Feliciati’s article in the reminder that “the goals of public history should be planned with the public, not merely for the public.” (385) The discussion surrounding the role historians play as mediators between the public and academic scholarship/historical narrative has to do with qualitative crowdsourcing (collecting oral history accounts, vetting donations to an archive, etc.), but some of the main ways that people get involved as a result of crowdsourcing are more quantitative in nature (transcribing documents, creating and reviewing metadata, for example).
This week’s exercise involved participating in the latter kind of activities. I engaged with both the National Archive’s Citizen Archivist program and with two transcription projects listed on From the Page. I have been a member of the “Citizen Archivist” program for around four years- I wish I could remember how I learned of the website, but I can’t. I think that the National Archives’ website does an excellent job at making transcription both engaging and relatively easy for the public. There are both video and written tutorials on the site that include everything from brief “how to get started” instructions to more in depth articles that explain how to denote stamps and transcribe maps. The collections of documents to be transcribed are presented as “missions” to complete. Many of the mission topics are intriguing and have broad appeal- current examples include JFK assassination records, UAP (UFO) records from Project Blue Book, and Revolutionary War pension files. It’s easy to get started with the abundance of tutorials available and the interesting subject matter makes it easy to stay and transcribe many pages within a single session.
From the Page is different from the National Archives’ program in several ways. Many different institutions upload documents to the site, rather than being used by a single entity or organization. While a platform such as From the Page is a boon in that it provides a multitude of institutions with a way to gain access to the public’s assistance, the inclusion of assignments from many different entities also has its drawbacks. I worked on transcriptions for several different assignments and in doing so, discovered that there were no uniform guidelines across projects. While transcribing pages for the Tennessee State Library and Archives, users are directed to “use original punctuation. Don’t add punctuation.” If they switch to one of the transcription projects led by Texas A&M, they are instructed to “add modern periods, but don’t add punctuation like commas and apostrophes.” This is an understandable consequence of multiple repositories using the same website to crowdsource, but the variance in guidelines does result in users encountering some friction when they wish to switch projects. This is clearly not an insurmountable barrier; some of the projects I viewed were completely transcribed and awaiting review, while many others are actively being worked on (one can see a running log of recent edits that have been made by other users).
Both the National Archives and the From the Page website make excellent use of gamification strategies. A task that could be regarded as mundane is made interesting through the framing of the projects as “missions,” the inclusion of progress bars to track completion rates, and the opportunity to transcribe genuinely interesting material. These strategies have been very successful at getting the public involved in completing a task that can be almost as tedious as it is necessary. These projects are an excellent example of how crowdsourcing “done right.”
References
Feliciati, Pierluigi. “Planning with the Public: How to Co-develop Digital Public History Projects?” In Handbook of Digital Public History edited by Serge Noiret, Mark Tebeau and Gerben Zaagsma, 385-394. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-034
Noiret, Serge. “Sharing Authority in Online Collaborative Public History Practices” In Handbook of Digital Public History edited by Serge Noiret, Mark Tebeau and Gerben Zaagsma, 49-60. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-004
Noiret, Serge. “Crowdsourcing and User Generated Content: The Raison d’Être of Digital Public History” In Handbook of Digital Public History edited by Serge Noiret, Mark Tebeau and Gerben Zaagsma, 35-48. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-003
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