Hi Stephen,
if I may answer your questions with a few more questions and a bit of a
brain dump...
What kinds of data are you looking to get back from the process? And who
will be using that data, and for what purposes? Once you've got a firm list
of data you could get back, you can think about designing different tasks
for the different audiences that would be interested in helping with that,
and think about platforms from there. Personally, gathering permanently
useful knowledge seems like a more meaningful (and thus more engaging) goal
than creating busy work generating data with uncertain value.
And to approach it from the other side, what kinds of information about
your collections do your passionate audiences and communities already share
with you? How do they use the collections, and where do they discuss them?
The Zooniverse project proposals form e.g.
http://conscicom.org/proposals/form/ also has useful prompts about what
kinds of community outreach you can support.
I've reviewed a couple of hundred crowdsourcing projects for my PhD and I'd
say three important lessons are: allow enough time for usability/UX testing
and optimisation; budget in time for community conversation and outreach
for every single week the project is running; and your project will
inevitably change (usually for the better) after contact with participants.
You might also want to consider starting with a 'niche' project as a pilot
- for example, focusing on a particular topic, genre or collection as this
seems to help communities of participants form, and it's also easier to get
a sense of overall progress towards your goal.
Gamifying projects (competitive leaderboards, etc) encourages some
audiences and discourages others. If you've got a good sense of what your
current communities and audiences would find rewarding, can you translate
some of that into appropriate rewards for contributions?
If you're looking at video content, you may already have seen Waisda? for
transcribing audio-visual archives (http://woordentikkertje.manbijthond.nl/
is in Dutch but Google Translate etc should give you the idea). The US
National Archives are using a platform called Amara for transcribing videos
http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/?p=9222
The Public Catalogue Foundation/BBC's Your Paintings Tagger
http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk uses various controlled vocabularies, which has
similarly divided people - some love it, some find it adds to the
complexity of the task. You may have noticed a running theme in that no one
interface will suit every potential user! As Sarah said, there are many
different 'crowds'. If you have the resources, you could experiment with
structured vs unstructured transcription or tagging and see which works
better for your crowds.
And on the off-chance you can get to Maryland next week, I'm teaching a
week-long crowdsourcing workshop with Ben Brumfield at a Digital Humanities
summer school (
http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt/course/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage/).
Failing that, I can send you the slides I use in crowdsourcing design
activities.
Cheers, Mia
--------------------------------------------
http://openobjects.org.uk/
http://twitter.com/mia_out
'Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage'
<http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=19663&edition_id=1209349602>
is out in October!
I mostly use this address for list mail; my open.ac.uk address is checked
daily
On 28 July 2014 15:02, Stephen McConnachie <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> In the BFI we're starting to scope a crowd sourcing project based on BFI
> National Archive moving image collections (and possibly photograph
> collection).
>
> We're at a very early stage. For example, we're still defining the
> ambition: do we want to gather permanently useful knowledge - such as
> geographic location for film scenes, annotated with timecode - for the
> BFI's database; or do we simply want to engage existing audiences and
> potentially new audiences in BFI activities / collections. Or both!
>
> So I'm interested in learning from our peers in the museum sector, who are
> farther down this path than we are. I'm particularly interested in any
> Adlib users who have implemented crowd sourcing projects which write the
> data to their Adlib system, either by API integration, or separate offline
> workflow.
>
> Maybe there's a great online resource describing the pitfalls, benefits,
> methods, which I have missed? Collections Trust?
>
> 1. platforms
> Which platforms / websites / plugins are the obvious leaders in offering
> data capture functionality to online users, and harvesting of that data for
> use in a permanent repository?
>
> Are there free options worth considering? Or plugins for leading
> applications - eg Drupal, Wordpress?
>
> Or is it better to find a developer budget / resource and just build a
> bespoke layer to your website / collections search application?
>
> 2. methodologies
> Is it better to offer tightly controlled datasets for users to select (eg
> genre / subject taxonomies), or is it more successful to offer more
> freedom, and map / translate responses to your controlled datasets after
> the fact?
> (think I answered my own question, but: who has done it, by either
> approach, and what lessons did you learn?)
>
> Is it better to attempt a gamification / reward model, and if so, what has
> worked and what has failed? For example: free tickets to physical domain
> events? Badges for social media use? Is a tiered reward model better - ie,
> contribute 100 responses and get this thing / contribute 1000 and get this
> much better thing?
>
> 3. business cases / benefits
> If you have delivered a crowd sourcing project, how did you pitch and
> demonstrate benefits to the organisation? Traffic to web resource? Survey?
> Social media feedback?
>
> Did you obtain funding help from any general research sources or specific
> data sources? If so, practical tips on how that is achieved? If not, how
> did you make the business case for internal resourcing?
>
> Stephen
>
> ****************************************************************
> website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
> [un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
> ****************************************************************
>
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
|