Crowdsourcing, also known as participation projects, taps into the expertise of a multitude of people where everyone adds on top of each other's historical knowledge. Yet, crowdsourcing is not just used in the historical world. In terms of business, my parents will often do participation projects in order to facilitate fair, equitable, and sustainable outcomes.
The generation of communal knowledge is not a new phenomenon, however. In the late nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary solicited volunteers to submit words and their usage for inclusion in the dictionary. The historian Jo Guldi's work on participatory mapping shows that urban planners in the middle of the twentieth century attempted to learn from and listen to members of a community.
Today, the digital turn has offered new technologies to engage with communities and significantly widened the number of possible participants. The success of recent digital crowdsourcing projects, including Flickr Commons and the National Archive's Citizen Archivist Dashboard, have demonstrated the degree of success that crowdsourcing offers to cultural heritage and public digital history. Like any research, a crowdsourcing project requires careful planning and an understanding of what is meant by crowdsourcing in a specific project.
In terms of the Flickr Commons, this crowdsourcing project has two main objectives: “To increase access to publicly-held photography collections and to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)” (Flickr Commons website). As a photography nerd myself, I have always loved flipping through all of the Flickr Commons pictures, especially those by local museums and historians in the DMV area, like the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian has produced multiple pictures on the Flickr Commons, and they even have a group called Smithsonian Through Your Lens where almost 4,000 pictures have been uploaded. I think that it is great to see local historical organizations chipping in.
Citizen Archivist, on the other hand, is a project run through the National Archives and Records Administration that crowdsources contributions such as tags and transcripts of digital images in NARA's database. These contributions are designed to increase public access to the records of the Federal Government by helping organize, describe and classify its vast historical records. There are more than 10 billion pages of paper records stored in digital files, and of that vast quantity only a small percentage have been labeled, translated, or cataloged. The project is designed to support the White House's Open Government Directive and employs an open-source editing style much like that of Wikipedia. The title Citizen Archivist was invented by David Ferriero, who is the 10th Archivist of the United States, to describe how the National Archives can harness the public in order to contribute to the organization of records.
In conclusion, with the ubiquity of the internet, crowdsourcing help, resources, and artifacts has been an effective way for libraries, museums, institutes, and independent projects to get assistance with some of their public history efforts.
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