Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 
21st Century

9th-10th September 2015
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King's College London

Research in the humanities was once the preserve of an academic and 
professional elite, conducted in universities, libraries, museums and 
archives, with clear criteria for belonging to the communities 
undertaking it. In the last ten years however, science and business, 
which shared this culture of exclusivity with the humanities, has found 
these boundaries challenged through crowdsourcing, and have flourished 
as a result. This collaborative and interdisciplinary symposium, 
organised jointly by King's College London’s Department of Digital 
Humanities (DDH) and Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and 
Textual Analysis (CESTA), seeks to explore the ways in which humanities 
and cultural heritage research is enriched through scholarly 
crowdsourcing. It brings together the unique perspectives on the subject 
that DDH and CESTA have developed over the past three years, including 
DDH’s Crowd-Sourcing Scoping Study funded by the AHRC, and Stanford’s 
Humanities Crowdsourcing research theme. These activities represent the 
cutting edge of humanities crowdsourcing in both its theory and its 
practice; and the symposium’s main aim is to build a bridge between the 
two. It will include presentations from this emerging field’s leading 
scholars and practitioners.

The meeting will explore the arc between the inception of humanities 
crowd-sourcing as a method of data processing adopted largely 
uncritically from big science, to its present instance as as means of 
interrogating fuzzy and disparate humanities research data in new ways 
using ‘non-professional’ engagement and input, and to future 
possibilities involving completely new ways of co-producing humanities 
research across increasingly blurred institutional and professional 
boundaries.

Event URL, including registration link and directions: 
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/eventrecords/2015/crowdsourcing.aspx 


The full programme will appear on the website soon.

Registration is £20, including lunch on both days and refreshments. Last 
booking date is 31 August 2015.

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Dr. Stuart Dunn
Lecturer
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London, WC2B 5RL

Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel. +44 (0)20 7848 2709
Fax. +44 (0)20 7848 2980

Blog: http://stuartdunn.wordpress.com