Crowdsourcing

122 Sullivan St. 2nd Floor rear. Leveroni family. Earn 4 cents a gross making violets. Can make 20 gross a day when children work all day. Location: New York, New York (State)”

What is it?

• Outsourcing a task to an unidentified group of people (the crowd) to get a job done

• Often the crowdsourcERS will offer an incentive: small amount of money; badge; editorial credit

Crowdsourcing ?

• Cost-effective

• Time-effective

• Enables more done, faster to increase accessibility and outreach

• More done, faster, propels projects requiring data

BUT, Crowdsourcing

• Doesn’t necessarily increase quality of product

• Doesn’t do away with checks and balances

• Isn’t automatic: does require knowledgeable staff to educate, motivate, set tasks, quality control, final ublication

Communal Knowledge Building

• Wikipedia

• Commons (sharing materials and resources)

• And in discipline specific projects, e.g. history…

Commercial crowdsourcing

• Amazon’s mTurk

• Popular opinion: People’s Choice; American Idol

• M&M new colour

Traditional practices

• A single document can (and does) take months in meticulous series of steps

• Gather materials• Select, authenticate• Reproduce• Add metadata• Transcribe to create machine and human-readable material• Checks and balances: multiple proofreading processes• Annotate: contextualize, explain• Publish• Example: Abraham Lincoln papers

Examples in history

• Data-gathering from non-machine readable sources that help index and catalog materials: World War I diaries

• Transcription: Papers of the War Department

• Data gathering: Old Weather

• All of the above: Smithsonian Volunteers