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SunoikisisDC Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage, Spring 2022

Session 1: Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage

Thursday January 13, 2022, starting at 16:15 GMT = 17:15 CET (for 90 minutes)

Convenors: Gabriel Bodard (U of London), Richard Nevell (Wikimedia UK), John Pearce (KCL)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/taedqUaJIqU

Slides: Combined slides (PDF)

Outline

This session will address some of the issues, opportunities and risks around "crowdsourcing"—gathering contributions from the general public or more select outside communities—of data, metadata or other material such as images, anecdotes or citations, to supplement cultural heritage records. We will discuss a few examples of projects such as the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Thames Discovery Programme, in the context of UK heritage law, and look at the largest heritage crowdsourcing project of all: articles about monuments and sites in Wikipedia and the Wikimedia family of resources.

Seminar readings

  1. Lala Hajibayova & Kiersten F. Latham. 2017. “Exploring Museum Crowdsourcing Projects through Bordieu’s Lens.” Knowledge Organization 44-7, 506-514. Available: https://www.ergon-verlag.de/isko_ko/downloads/ko_44_2017_7_e.pdf
  2. Victoria Leonard & Sarah E. Bond. 2019. “Advancing Feminism Online.” Studies in Late Antiquity 3.1, 4–16. Available: https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-abstract/3/1/4/83368/Advancing-Feminism-OnlineOnline-Tools-Visibility?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Further reading

  • Bevan, A., Pett, D. et al. 2014. "Citizen Archaeologists. Online Collaborative Research about the Human Past." Human Computation 1:2:185-199 DOI: 10.15346/hc.v1i2.9
  • Bland, R. 2008. "The development and future of the Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme," in S Thomas and P Stone (eds.), Metal Detecting and Archaeology, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 63-85.
  • Bland, R. 2013 "Response: the Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme." Internet Archaeology 33. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.33.8 (this is in part a response to other papers in the same volume which again may be of interest if you wish to take this further. Especially the papers by Campbell, Wilson and Harrison)
  • Dunn, S. & Hedges, M. 2013. "Crowd-sourcing as a Component of Humanities Research Infrastructures." International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7.1, 147-169. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2013.0086
  • Gill, D. 2010. "The Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act: Protecting the Archaeology of England and Wales?" Papers of the Institute of Archaeology 20, 1-11. Available: https://doi.org/10.5334/pia.333 (you may also find the other short papers in this volume of interest)
  • Jones, Lori & Nevell, Richard 2016. "Plagued by doubt and viral misinformation: the need for evidence-based use of historical disease images", Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (10) https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(16)30119-0, open access at https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/27873 (A case study of how information can spread online, and the role of crowd-sourcing in verifying and correcting information)
  • Moore, Lucy & Nevell, Richard 2021. "Race, gender, and Wikipedia: how the global encyclopaedia deals with inequality" Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 31 (1) http://doi.org/10.5334/bha-660 (A short piece in a special edition about inequality and race in the histories of archaeology)
  • Orlandi, S. 2016. "Ancient Inscriptions between Citizens and Scholars: The Double Soul of the EAGLE Project." In Romanello M. & Bodard G, Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press. Available: https://doi.org/10.5334/bat.l
  • Ridge, Mia 2013. "From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing." Curator 56.4, 435–450. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/39117/
  • Ridge, Mia 2016. Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research. PhD thesis Open University. Available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/45519/
  • Robbins, K. 2013. "Balancing the scales: exploring the variable effects of collection bias on data collected by the Portable Antiquities Scheme." Landscapes 14.1, 54-72.

Other resources

Exercise

Default exercise

  1. If you do not already have one, create an account on Wikipedia. Please choose a username that your colleagues will be able to recognise as you (if you prefer not to use your real name, tell us what username you have chosen). If you cannot use Wikipedia for any reason, you must choose the alternative exercise below.

  2. Before you start the main exercise, if you have created a new WP account, you should spend a bit of time looking for typos, unclear phrases, incorrect punctuation, or other very small and uncontroversial things you can correct. Once you have a dozen small edits under your belt, your account is less likely to be flagged as suspicious.

  3. In discussion with your group of colleagues, choose a page or small group of pages on Wikipedia that you would like to expand or improve. Start with small things: for example, add a reference to a secondary source, improve a description of an ancient place or person, or similar. If you add new information, remember to add a reference to a notable secondary source supporting the statement.

  4. Look at the pages edited by your colleagues, and if you can comment on or further improve those pages. Keep an eye on your page·s over the next few weeks, and see if anyone else engages with your edits. (Caveat: This may not always be a positive experience!)

Finding pages to work on

Alternative exercise (not involving Wikipedia)

This exercise will involve the Digital Classicist wiki that has been introduced in the video.

  1. Contact Gabriel Bodard or one of the other administrators of the Digital Classicist wiki, and request an editing account for the wiki
  2. Choose a topic, project or category or cluster of pages that you are familiar with or would like to know more about (for example EpiDoc, EFES, Recogito, GIS, 3D imaging, Sketchfab) or another topic from this semester's syllabus.
  3. Browse the pages and other pages in the wiki that are linked from it, and think about places you could improve the site, e.g. by adding links to relevant pages, updating references and presentations, expanding descriptions, bringing information up to date.
  4. Log into the site and make a few changes. Share these changes with your colleagues or through the SunoikisisDC issue tracker. Keep an eye on the page and see if anyone further edits your page in the next few days or weeks.
  5. If you would like to create a new page, ask Gabby for a list of suggested projects and tools that need to be added to the site. Have a look at the advice for editing the wiki page for suggested format for new pages.
  6. Also look at recent changes and any edits by your colleagues. Note the kinds of contributions that are appearing, and feel free to edit, correct or otherwise improve on those contributions.
Clone this wiki locally