Workshop: Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage, Rice University

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As part of my trip to Texas for SXSW, I was invited to give a workshop on 'Crowdsourcing and Cultural Heritage' in the Fondren Library at Rice University's Humanities Research Center Sawyer Seminar series on March 7, 2016. My slides are below. My visit was a great chance to find out more about the teaching and projects at the Research Center, and my thanks go to the organisers for their excellent hospitality.

Abstract: This workshop will provide an overview of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and consider the ethics and motivations for participation. International case studies will be discussed to provide real life illustrations of design tips and to inspire creative thinking.

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Rice University

HILT Summer School 2015: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'

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Resources for the course on Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage at HILT 2015 I'm teaching with Ben Brumfield.

Course Google Doc for collaborative note-taking, links, etc.

Flickr Group for HILT 2015 Crowdsourcing photos

Mia's storify of the week and the class presentation for the HILT Show and Tell.

Projects made in the class

Well done @cmderose_wisc @nebrown63 @ElizHansen @ESPaul @vac11 @kmthomas06 @WendyJ1226 @HistorianOnFire @Jim_Salmons @TimlynnBabitsky + Nancy!

Monday: overview, speed dating

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises for Monday

Session 2: links to find a project you love! For non-English language projects, try Crowdsourcing the world's heritage.

Prompts for thinking about projects:

  • How clear was the purpose of the site? How well was it reflected in the 'call to action' and other text?
  • How easy was it to get started?
  • Were the steps to complete the task clear?
  • How enjoyable was the task?
  • Did the reward (if any) feel appropriate?
  • Looking at the site overall, does the project appear to be effective?
  • What is the input content? What is the output content?
  • What validation methods appear to have been used?
  • Who is the probable audience and what motivates them to participate?
  • How does the project let participants know they're making a difference?
  • Does the site support communication between participants?
  • How was the site marketed to potential participants?
  • Did the site anticipate your questions about the tasks?

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides and Exercises Tuesday

http://tinyurl.com/EminentScotsmen

http://tinyurl.com/Graves1845

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Wednesday

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Thursday

HILT Crowdsourcing Slides Friday

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HILT 2015 Crowdsourcing class

Continue reading "HILT Summer School 2015: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'"

HILT Summer School: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'

In August 2014 I taught 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage' with Ben Brumfield at HILT (Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching) at MITH in Maryland. Thanks to all the participants for making it such a great workshop!

The Course Syllabus and Slide Decks are available for download below.

If you found this post useful, you might be interested in my book, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage.

Continue reading "HILT Summer School: 'Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage'"

Seminar paper: 'Messy understandings in code'

I was invited to present at Speaking in Code, an NEH-funded symposium and summit to 'give voice to what is almost always tacitly expressed in our work: expert knowledge about the intellectual and interpretive dimensions of DH code-craft, and unspoken understandings about the relation of that work to ethics, scholarly method, and humanities theory'. I've been writing about this for a while, so this event was both personally and professional important.

From my opening slide:

'There's a fundamental tension between available tools and cultural heritage data: we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Do you craft the tools to the data or the data to the tool?

So what do you do with square pegs and round holes? You can chop off the interesting edges to fit something into a round hole, you can reduce the size of the entire peg so it'll slip through, or you can make a new bespoke hole that'll fit your peg. But then how do we make the choices we've made obvious to people who encounter the data we've squeezed through various holes? It's particularly important if people are using these collections in scholarly work to make the flattenings, exclusions that shape a dataset visible.

The choices you make will depend on your resources and skills, the audience for and the purpose of the final product… Will look at some examples of visualisations for exploring collections where I had to tidy the mess to make them work, and an example of designing software to cope with the messy reality it was trying to reflect.

I want to set the scene with my own experiences with cultural heritage data, but am curious to hear about your own experiences with messy data in your respective fields, and the solutions you've explored for dealing with it and conveying your decisions.'

Messy Understandings Speaking in Code (PDF)

Workshop: 'Designing successful digital humanities crowdsourcing projects'

I ran a half-day workshop onĀ 'Designing successful digital humanities crowdsourcing projects' at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference in sunny Lincoln, Nebraska.

Workshop attendees: download the slides (2mb PDF) DH2013 Crowdsourcing workshop slides and exercises handout (Word doc): DH2013 Crowdsourcing workshop exercises.

I've started a braindump of 'emerging best practice' tips and questions from the workshop below…

Tips for designing humanities crowdsourcing projects Continue reading "Workshop: 'Designing successful digital humanities crowdsourcing projects'"