DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing?

Applications are now open for an expert workshop to be held in Kraków,
Poland, on 12 July 2016, 9:30am - 4:00pm, as part of the Digital Humanities
2016 conference (http://dh2016.adho.org/).

We welcome applications from all, but please note that we will aim balance
expertise, disciplinary backgrounds, experience with different types of
projects, and institutional and project affiliations when finalising our
list of participants. This workshop is not suitable for beginners.
Participants should have some practical knowledge of running crowdsourcing
projects or expertise in human computation, machine learning or other
relevant topics. You can apply to attend at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1l05Rba3EqMyy-X4UVmU9z7hQ-jlK2x2kLGvNtJfgtgQ/viewform

Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing - asking the public to help with inherently rewarding tasks
that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related
to cultural heritage collections or knowledge - is reasonably well
established in the humanities and cultural heritage sector. The success of
projects such as Transcribe Bentham, Old Weather and the Smithsonian
Transcription Center in processing content and engaging participants, and
the subsequent development of crowdsourcing platforms that make launching a
project easier, have increased interest in this area. While emerging best
practices have been documented in a growing body of scholarship, including
a recent report from the Crowd Consortium for Libraries and Archives
symposium, this workshop looks to the next 5 - 10 years of crowdsourcing in
the humanities, the sciences and in cultural heritage. The workshop will
gather international experts and senior project staff to document the
lessons to be learnt from projects to date and to discuss issues we expect
to be important in the future.

Topics for discussion will be grouped by participants in an
unconference-style opening session in which topics are proposed and voted
on by participants. They are likely to include the following:

Public humanities, education and audiences:

   - The use of crowdsourcing in formal education
   - Designing research questions that encourage participation and create
   space for informal education, the social production of knowledge and
   collaborative problem solving
   - The intersection of crowdsourcing, public humanities and engagement
   with cultural heritage and academic goals
   - Resolving tensions between encouraging participants to follow
   opportunities for informal learning and skills development, and focusing on
   project productivity


Organisational and project management issues:

   - Collaborative partnerships/funding to develop community platform(s)
   based on open source software
   - The state of focused research into interface design, engagement
   methods, and end-user impact studies
   - Design tensions between techniques that can improve the productivity
   of projects (such as handwritten text recognition and algorithmic
   classification) and optimising the user experience
   - Workflows for crowdsourced data and the ingestion of crowdsourced data
   into collections management systems
   - Challenges to institutional and expert authority
   - The compromises, pros and cons involved in specifying and selecting
   crowdsourcing software and platforms
   - The impact of crowdsourcing on organisational structures and resources
   - Inter-institutional cooperation or competition for crowdsourcing
   participants


Future challenges:

   - The integration of machine learning and other computational techniques
   with human computation
   - Lessons to be learnt from the long histories of grassroots and
   community history projects
   - Sharing lessons learnt and planning peer outreach to ensure that
   academics and cultural heritage professionals can benefit from collective
   best practice
   - The ethics of new and emerging forms of crowdsourcing


The timetable will include a brief round of introductions, a shared
agenda-setting exercise, four or so discussion sessions, and a final
session for closing remarks and to agree next steps.

The discussion and emergent guidelines documented during the workshop would
help future projects benefit from the collective experiences of
participants. Outcomes from the workshop might include a whitepaper and/or
the further development of or support for a peer network for humanities
crowdsourcing.

The workshop is organised by Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter
(Smithsonian Transcription Centre), Christy Henshaw (Wellcome Library) and
Ben Brumfield (FromThePage). For more information, please contact Ben.

We anticipate accepting 30 participants. You can apply to attend at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1l05Rba3EqMyy-X4UVmU9z7hQ-jlK2x2kLGvNtJfgtgQ/viewform

On notification of acceptance, participants should register via the DH2016
website.

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