[Air-L] Applications now open for DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing?

[Mia]

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 @benwbrum

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.

Best regards,

Mia

Digital Curator, British Library
http://openobjects.org.uk @mia_out