Crowd sourcing...what is it? According to Google, Crowd sourcing
is "the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project
by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid,
typically via the Internet." Within the humanities, crowdsourcing could be
used to complete a large task that an institution or non-profit could never
dream of completing alone with just volunteers or limited funding. This means
that by opening a digital collection up to the public to be processed, or even
annotated, a small historical society could get one year's worth of work done
in weeks or months depending on the popularity and traffic of the project.
That's incredible!
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| This is a screenshot of "Science Gossip" opened on Zooniverse Image Courtesy of {Sarah Sutton} |
However, there is a downside to this type of operation.
Using unpaid labor with little to no rewards for the worker seems like
stealing. This is just another way it has become ok to equate the humanities as
work that should be only voluntary and unpaid. Not only is crowdsourced work
open to error, it is also often masked as a game or simplified work - is this
what the public thinks historians do? I'm imagining a room of historians choosing
red...blue..green...blue... on Zooniverse Sanborn maps. I can see the good in
crowdsourcing, I really can. But we must pay attention to the consequences to
our profession. As someone who just spent six years working towards the goal of
doing this type of work, it is awfully disheartening to see that nearly every
entry-level job in museums has been turned into an unpaid internship. There is
a crisis in the middle - museum jobs jump from unpaid internships to senior
level development and curation jobs. Imagine if museums were a priority for
government funding - the accessible education! The economic benefits! The amazing
projects that could come from larger funding! Unfortunately this is not the
world I live in and I have to learn to primarily see the benefits of
crowdsourcing.
To try crowdsourcing for myself, I first decided to edit Wikipedia. That's pretty straight forward, right? NO. I am currently doing
research for my final digital history project on Marie Antoinette, so I have a
lot of sources laying around that could be put to use on the Marie Antoinette
page. The Marie Antoinette Wikipedia page is actually a "semi-protected"
page because of its popularity. Therefore, I would have to first submit my
potential changes and they would be either approved or disapproved...by...who
knows? Isn't the point of Wikipedia to create pages that are able to be edited
by the public? What a sham.
Deterred but not defeated, I decided to try for Zooniverse
instead. I chose to work on "science gossip." The task here is to
look at pages of scientific books and journals and identify any illustrations.
Once an illustration is identified with a rectangle drawn around the image, the
next task is to type in what the illustration shows, the scientific name of
what's in the illustration, and then to identify any contributors. This was
definitely difficult to do and required Google to find the scientific names of
certain sea creatures and plants on my end. I would do it again though and it
was pretty fun. It will be neat to know that when finished, I anonymously
helped to annotate the pages of a historic scientific document!
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