Engagement Strategies for Crowdsourcing the Humanities: are they Ethical?

Citizen Humanities Comes of Age: Crowdsourcing for the Humanities in the 21st Century9th-10th September 2015

Alexandra Eveleigha.eveleigh@westminster.ac.uk

Crowding out the Archivist? Implications of online user participation for archival theory and practice

The Triumphal Rhetoric of Archives 2.0

– Active engagement of (new) users– Co-creation of historical meaning– Institution as primary beneficiary– Expectation of committed, sustained participation

Library of Congress, flickr Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179137913/ No known copyright restrictions

The Participant Experience Framework

‘Success is down to the participants’ (P24)

Competitive Participation

Participation stimulated and rewarded by competition against others, towards the pursuit of extrinsic, fixed goal(s), possibly short-lived in duration.

And I would see, oh somebody’s got this many more than me; I’m gonna work really hard and then I’ll beat them! And oh, I’m really close to them! If I put in another half hour I’ll beat them, kinda thing. So I think that helped really, putting in extra effort and getting more data transcribed. (OW4)

Or the exploitation of labour?

I think that it is no good that promotion to captain depends on transcribed weather reports. Events are not taken into account; people are interested only in how many weather reports they transcribe. (OW-S)

Well, one of my colleagues actually said that he wouldn’t want it to be too successful because he’d be put out of a job. (P95)

Or Taylorism 2.0?*

It was very kind of factory type work. (P28)

There seems to be some sort of competition with the champion with the most entries. And I think that’s rather silly. It could almost be a reason not to do too much. I don’t want to be on the top of the list, I just… like, some… you know, have you got any work or something?! Well, it looks as if you’re someone who’s… if you do a lot of entries and [are] high--‐up in the ranking, it’s like you’re not doing anything else all day. So you probably don’t have a job or no friends. (P37)

DeWinter et al. (2014) ‘Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, scientific management and the capitalist appropriation of play’ Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 6(2), 109-127

Collaborative Participation

Participation in an open-ended cause that requires dedicated contributor cognitive effort, sustained by social interaction related to shared community interests.

I really enjoy the community in the forum as well. It’s great to work as part of a team that’s all interested in the same thing and more than happy to share experience, knowledge and research with each other. One of the things that keeps me coming back is how friendly and supportive everyone is. (OW-S)

Or a clique? An intrusion of privacy?

I became very disillusioned with the pages of banal and historical

chat when trying to read and search the forum. (OW-S)

No doubt the sharing of access problems or useful search

information can be helpful at times, but the grunt work really has

to be done alone. (P151)

Or a hotbed of plagiarism?

Historians aren’t used to doing like crowdsourcing and things

where they won’t necessarily get credit for… and I think that

because they’re not used to that maybe a lot of people aren’t willing to do that, not have their names associated with

something is kind of foreign to historians. (P30)

I recently had someone… a distant relative come into my tree and without so much as a greeting, took at the research I had

compiled. She downloaded the entire thing, facts,

documentation, pictures, even little personal family nicknames, stories, memories. Things that would have had no meaning to

her […] She is doing none of the work, and getting all the hard

earned rewards. (Posting on Ancestry Message Board)

Targeted Participation

Directed participation for personal challenge, amusement or diversion; purposeful but often sporadic or intermittent:

Curiosity and a love of knowledge are my main motivations; knowing that one’s work is of high calibre is a strong motivator as well, but there’s no need for excessive external validation to get the enjoyment from that. I don’t have enough time to make OW an important social community, so it’s more a matter of contributing to something that happens to be enjoyable. (OW-S)

It’s basically idle time that I would normally be spending checking my email or playing a Flash game, but I feel as if I’m contributing to something important. (OW7)

Or addiction?

When you’ve finished one scan, the next one automatically comes up. So that makes it very difficult to click away, to stop. You always want to do, oh, I can do this one. Or just one more. So that’s a very good motivator. (P37)

It is a great displacement activity and has helped me through redundancy and bereavement. It is both gratifying and worrying to realise that you know more about the ship you are Captain of than anyone else alive. (OW-S)

Immersive Participation

A personal and emotive journey of exploration, impelled by curiosity and an empathy with history:

The ‘real’ story that these logs imply is/was as hypnotically fascinating

as any form of fiction or non-fiction. (OW-S)

It opens up your world and your mind. It allows you to be able to, you

know, get different perspectives on something that you know you may

not have understood or known about before. Or even things in your

everyday life, it can open up in a new way where you can see it

difficult. You know, it allows you, takes you on different paths, and

that, you know, gives you new adventures to do in your everyday life

that otherwise you may not have even considered doing. (OW6)

Or an ethical dilemma?

I found an ancestry tree for the family. The owner doesn’t mention

my 2xgt.uncle, but has assumed his daughter’s stepfather was the

birth father, listing grandparents and other relations who are nothing to do with her. Perhaps she was never told of her father,

grew up believing her stepfather’s family was her own, and may

have passed down happy family memories which my facts could seriously affect. On the other hand, I’ve found my own family

‘secrets’ when researching, and even if initially unpleasant, I’ve

been pleased to find them, as they’ve ultimately solved various mysteries. So is there an argument that her descendants should

know the truth, and I should contact the tree owner? Or should I

follow my instincts and leave well alone?

(http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/forum/topic10829.html)

Towards Ethical Crowdsourcing in the Humanities

– The trap: thinking crowdsourcing is ethical because the work is unpaid or enjoyable

– Accepting differentiated goals

– More goal-oriented, less task-oriented

– ‘Less game, more play’ (DeWinter)– Extensible, flexible, adaptable – shaped by the

participants