Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage

Mia Ridge, Mia Ridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317156840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Crowdsourcing, or asking the general public to help contribute to shared goals, is increasingly popular in memory institutions as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data. This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of mutually beneficial engagement with the collections and research of museums, libraries, archives and academia, it benefits both audiences and institutions. However, successful crowdsourcing projects reflect a commitment to developing effective interface and technical designs. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions devised the right combination of source material and the tasks for their 'crowd'. The authors provide theoretically informed, actionable insights on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, outlining the context in which their projects were created, the challenges and opportunities that informed decisions during implementation, and reflecting on the results. This book will be essential reading for information and cultural management professionals, students and researchers in universities, corporate, public or academic libraries, museums and archives.

PART I
Case Studies

Chapter 1
Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn

Shelley Bernstein

Over the past decade, the Brooklyn Museum’s leadership has developed a thoughtful and comprehensive strategy to rethink the Museum experience and strengthen its offerings in order to inspire visitors. Starting with its core mission, the Museum’s priority is to build on a long-established commitment to serve its communities:

to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience; committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs; and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation; the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.¹

In the digital efforts at the Brooklyn Museum, we strive to bring to life this community-driven mission and all that it can mean both in the visitor’s experience within the building and online. In this chapter, we will look closely at selected large-scale projects to show the differences between them, discuss how the institution’s goals have shifted over time, and demonstrate how each project – from digital comment books; Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition; Split Second: Indian Paintings, an experiment in responsive interpretation to GO: a community-curated open studio project – was designed for a very specific kind of participation.

Early Projects

When first starting our digital efforts in 2007, we began asking ourselves what community meant on the web and quickly found inspiration in the image hosting site Flickr which hosted a strong community of participants deeply engaged in photography. The community at Flickr had been fostered through a series of design choices that allowed for strong associations and recognition among participants. When looking at a photograph on the site, you could see the life behind it by getting to know the photographer through how they saw the world, and also through other photographers who were commenting or tagging images in ways that allowed us to get to know them, too. The most successful thing about the design of the site was what its founder, Caterina Fake, said were her own goals in creating platforms for the web, ‘You should be able to feel the presence of other people on the Internet.’²

You could feel the presence of people pervasively throughout the Flickr platform; it had been designed to foster community from the very early days of the site’s creation. Our challenge was to take these same ideas and apply them to a museum setting. How could we could we highlight the visitor’s voice in a meaningful way and utilise technology and the web to foster this exchange?

Two early efforts included major projects both in the gallery and online – the publication of our collection on the website and the creation of electronic comment books throughout the galleries. There is nothing more important to a museum than the objects which form its basis and the visitors coming through its doors; both projects were designed to help to form a backbone of trust between visitors and the Museum, allowing them a voice in our facility and holdings.

When publishing our collection online³ we wanted object records to come to life, infused with the visitor activity around them. Each collection record would allow people to tag, comment and mark it as a ‘favourite’, but they would also go beyond simple information gathering by asking people to join our ‘Posse’, a community of participants on the Museum’s collection website who would help us augment object records while being attributed for their efforts. When a visitor to our website looks at an object in our collection, they can quickly see a whole universe of activity around it with people commenting and tagging objects; it is easy to see an individual’s activity and to gain an understanding of who they are and the contributions they have made because this activity is displayed right along with the Museum’s object in question. In addition to allowing this type of activity on each object’s page, online and in-gallery games were created which allow participants to tag or clean up records in a more competitive setting. Through this project, the institution has gained valuable information which has helped fix problems in our collection online⁴ and has made our collection more accessible through tagging contributions.

During the same year the Museum began a project to replace existing paper visitor comment books with electronic versions which would run on small computer kiosks and, later, iPads. These comment books, available in every major gallery, ask our visitors to tell us about their experiences. The feedback we receive is displayed both in the gallery and online, while curatorial and visitor services staff are emailed weekly digests of the activity. Using this system, a visitor can leave us a comment about their experience and another potential visitor can read those thoughts online before deciding to come and see a show because both positive and negative comments are displayed on an exhibition’s web presence. As staff receive weekly digests about the visitor experience, they can quickly discover what worked and did not within any given show. Staff have been able to adapt and change the visitor experience on the fly based on some of the feedback received, but with larger issues, staff consider how to adjust future shows to improve those experiences. The comment books present the institution with a full cycle of participation and learning, allowing our visitors to participate in feedback and honouring that participation by showing it to other visitors and our staff to gain greater understanding of what each person experiences when he or she comes to the Museum.

These early initiatives in crowdsourcing have allowed our audience to participate while the institution gained considerable insight into its holdings and audience, but both examples fell short of a truly meaningful exchange. Visitor interactions with objects on our website were never connected to their in-person visitation and, though they could participate, there was no way to have a meaningful dialogue. Community members could establish profiles and, as a result, there was a life to their presence online, but it was fairly limited in scope. Staff could respond to comments left in the electronic comment books, but visitors were not notified if their questions had been answered or, more importantly, that their feedback had made a difference. As we continue to move forward with these two initiatives we are developing ways to bridge the online and in-person visitor gap.

In the meantime, we have also looked to create more specific projects which would allow visitor interaction with the institution to become all the more meaningful and create a deeper sense of engagement.

Crowdsourcing as Exhibition

In 2008, the Museum embarked on Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, a photography installation that invited the general public to participate in the exhibition design process. The project took its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserted that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals. Click! explored whether Surowiecki’s premise could be applied to the visual arts.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that maintaining diversity and independence are two key factors for a crowd to be wise. Both issues are discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3 of the book:

Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision making.

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second, independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.⁵

While we had been designing for community in early projects, the subject matter of Click! required us to design for crowds. In addition to trying to discover if a diverse crowd was just as ‘wise’ at evaluating art as the trained experts, the Brooklyn-focused content of Click! was intended to foster a local audience and to put the community’s choices on the walls of the institution, which was normally seen as sacred space for curators.

Click! began with an open call asking photographers to submit a work of photography electronically that would respond to the exhibition’s theme, ‘Changing Faces of Brooklyn’. While not specifically requiring photographers to be Brooklyn-based, the theme was defined to appeal to those who understood the borough and to, eventually, foster a local audience of visitors coming to view the exhibition. As Surowiecki had noted, diversity was a key factor in facilitating wise decision-making among crowds, so the theme was selected with an eye towards the variety of interpretations it could inspire. In total, 389 photographers submitted images, with subjects ranging from Brooklyn’s ongoing gentrification, depictions of social issues facing the borough and specific scenes in neighbourhoods which illustrated the changes taking place in familiar areas.

In order to minimise influences from outside the project, the open call was a blind process, each participant could only submit one photograph for consideration, and during the call photographers could not see the photographs submitted by other photographers. Despite these design choices to foster crowd-like participation, communities quickly formed around the process. Many of the photographers were creating small groups who would go out and shoot every weekend, discuss the resulting work, and post their progress online throughout the four week submission period prior to selecting the single work they would eventually submit.

After the conclusion of the open call, the general public was asked to evaluate photographs online using a specifically designed interface which would minimise influence, another factor important to Surowiecki’s theory. While many of the features seen on successful websites are designed to foster community, they also create a great deal of influence – the number of views, comments, favourites, most emailed and leader boards of the modern website are built to influence others. When thinking about the creation of a tool where submitted photographs would be evaluated, we wanted to minimise influence as much as possible and rethink the ‘social’ design features now commonplace.

During the six week evaluation period, anyone on the web could evaluate the pool of 389 submitted photographs. As part of the evaluation, each participant self-selected his/her knowledge level (from ‘none’ to ‘expert’) and geographic location. Participants were asked to assess the photographs that were submitted, using a sliding scale to label photographs from ‘most’ to ‘least’ effective, taking into consideration aesthetics, the photographic techniques used and the relevance of the work to the exhibition’s theme. The online evaluation tool was designed to promote fairness. Works were presented at random, and an algorithm ensured all photographs were seen an equal number of times. To minimise influence, works were displayed without the artist attribution; evaluators were unable to skip past images or to forward links to individual works. Participants co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Introduction
• PART I: CASE STUDIES
• PART II CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE CROWDSOURCING
• Index