Jefferson’s Newspaper

Recently, I’m noticing a lot of chatter about “crowdsourcing history.” The discussion about leveraging crowds in history-making has been going for quite some time, but only now seems to be reaching a point of acceptance. In case you’ve been living under a very Amish rock, here’s how Wikipedia – the king of the crowds – defines the term.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data… The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

If you didn’t pick up on that right away, then maybe you should head over to wikipedia.org and tweak the punctuation, add some citations, or re-write the entire definition. That is the essence of crowdsourcing and it’s nothing new. The term has been around for at least a few years, serving as nom d’guerr for the so-called Web 2.0 revolution. The general idea is that many people will collectively do for free (or cheap) what one or a few people would do for money (i.e. a salary). In the case of Wikipedia, we all watched (some in glee, others in terror) as free user-generated content dethroned and then beheaded maligned publishing giants Encyclopedia Brittanica and Microsoft Encarta (Guardian, 2009).

Could a similar coup unseat scholars, teachers, and publishers in the humanities? Well, no. In fact, that’s a really stupid question. But you might want to pay attention anyway. Because for one thing, we can see from such events that students (and the public in general) are learning in different ways. They are consuming information, which one might argue is very different from learning, at a rate unimagined even by futurists such as H.G. Wells, who envisioned an integrated World Brain (Wells, 1938) capable of storing, indexing, and retrieving from the global knowledge base.

Even if one agrees that the Internet fullfills Wells’ prophecy – I don’t by the way – then a distinction must be made between knowledge and information. Without getting into the vast LIS literature the topic, we can generally agree that information is factual and verifiable, whereas knowledge is something more esoteric. It involves understanding that is not easily transmitted or received. It is an end result. The point being that you or your students may easily find and recite a list of every faction in the Spanish Civil War, but that doesn’t mean anyone truly understands what is going on (as case in point, I have been pondering why the Spanish anarchists refused tips for at least a decade… but then, I identified as an anarchist and worked for tips for nearly a decade). Lists, including names, timelines, and inventories (I’m talking to you, military history buff) are information at best (as opposed to data at worst). They are generally meaningless without contextual knowledge. So the teacher and the scholar (especially in the humanities one might argue) still have a central role in the creation, maintenance and transmission of knowledge. Until Google unleashes its sentient robot army, this will not change.

As learners and consumers of information, we will nonetheless continue down paths shaped by the Internet. If not in school, then everywhere else. Educators ignore real changes in our society at their own peril and to the disservice of their students. Just as the social and labor historians were both a culmination and a component of social and cultural change in the last century, so too will be digital historians and digital humanists. (This is not to suggest any comparably meaningful moral or ethical imperative). Classroom hardware has evolved from chalkboard to Powerpoint to whiteboard in the past decade, but the teacher is, as ever, at the front of the room projecting information. It can be interactive, surely. The best educators craft stories, start discussions, stoke debates, and facilitate hands-on experience. But they retain control over the parameters and content of the learning. They choose the text-books, design the syllabi, prepare the lectures, and grade the results. Crowdsourcing projects involve giving up some of this control – to students and also to strangers. As always, the specter of misinformation hangs over all information not controlled by authority (as if authority didn’t propagate its fair share of BS). Indeed, discussion of crowd sourcing content-creation and review, particularly in libraries, often hangs on the notion of “radical trust” – can online communities be trusted to create a quality product that is free from major errors and willful or accidental misinformation? It is an important question and, in the context of educational projects, one that can be addressed, like any other assignment, by applying appropriate degrees of control and setting clear parameters. Of course, there will still be issues with the end product.

Below is a very brief survey of some digital history and humanities projects that apply the crowdsourcing idea to various degrees. It is by no means comprehensive, or even very good. It’s just some things that come to mind in no particular order.

History Engine
http://historyengine.richmond.edu/pages/home
Description: A wiki-based “educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database.” Students do all the work as part of course assignments and take part in the creation of an actual usable resource. Basically, a focused and controllable Wikipedia. Quality and completeness varies. Limited documentation and supervision required.

WhereYouThere?
http://www.wereyouthere.com/
Description: Social networking site collects firsthand accounts of historic moments (JFK assasination, 9/11/2001, First Lunar Landing, etc.) to create a resource for historical, journalistic and literary research on one hand, and schamltzy nostalgia and incoherent ramblings on the other. More noise than signal, but as someone who spends a lot of time with oral histories, I can say that this is a really interesting idea. Perhaps something like this could work on a smaller scale with some administrative control and narrower parameters. Speaking of which…

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
http://hurricanearchive.org
Description: Uses Omeka “to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts.” No real way to verify information or control quality, but that’s not really the point. Succeeds in creating a focused archive of first-hand accounts on a topic that is emotionally and politically charged, and will be for years to come.

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Project
http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp
Description: “The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, has commenced a program to digitise out of copyright newspapers. We are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles… published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies.” Users can add tags and comments, as well as correct the automatically-generated text transcriptions

The Commons on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/commons
Description: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.” Users are “invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.” Participants include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institute, and the George Eastman House.

Dan Cohen’s Twitter Experiment
http://www.dancohen.org/2009/04/29/the-spider-and-the-web-results
Description: “…using Twitter to replicate digitally the traditional ‘author’s query,’ where a scholar asks readers of a journal for assistance with a research project. I believe the results of this experiment are instructive about the significant advantages—and some disadvantages—for academia of what has come to be known as crowdsourcing.” Go read the blog post for more. This is my favorite example, because it is so easy. It’s not a website, it’s not an educational resource; it’s more akin to performance art (performance history? or as Cohen says “stunt lecturing”?). Assuming you have a good handful of Twitter followers, you can organize and carry out little events like this on short notice and without any technological “overhead.”

Related Reading:

• Stephen Mihm in the Boston Globe: Everyone’s a Historian Now
• Crowdsourcing Blog: User-Generated Content in History
• Spellbound Blog: Crowdsourced Transcription and Collaborative Annotation
• Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Wired Campus): Management Prof. Uses Crowdsourcing to Write Textbook

There are many more projects and articles that apply to this topic. But this is a blog post, not a research paper. Feel free to share more resources and ideas in the comments.