Welcome to The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
Welcome to the open access site for The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, written through the Collective Wisdom project and shared here to provide commentable access to our first version.
About The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is a form of digitally-enabled participation that promises deeper, more engaged relationships with the public via meaningful tasks with cultural heritage collections. Crowdsourcing has helped to provide a framework for online participation with, and around, cultural heritage collections for over a decade. The Collective Wisdom Handbook is a comprehensive, practical and authoritative guide to crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation projects in the cultural heritage sector.
The Handbook is written for crowdsourcing practitioners who work in cultural institutions, as well as those who wish to gain experience with crowdsourcing. It provides both practical tips, grounded in lessons often learned the hard way, and inspiration from research across a range of disciplines. Case studies and perspectives based on our experience are woven throughout the book, complemented by information drawn from research literature and practice within the field, and supplemented with quotes from small surveys we ran for project volunteers and stakeholders.
The structure of the Handbook is designed around the key stages of planning, implementing, and running a crowdsourcing project. Threads woven through that structure include understanding and matching activities to participant motivations, articulating and embedding your values, planning for the eventual uses of the data, and recognizing the institutional, social, and technological context in which you are working. Each chapter contains perspectives and case studies that summarize or exemplify the ideas discussed in the text.
The Handbook is an important outcome of the AHRC-funded Collective Wisdom project, which aimed to produce an open access book that provides the definitive guide to designing, managing, and integrating crowdsourcing activities for cultural heritage collections. Itself an example of “collective wisdom,” this book was written collaboratively with participants selected from responses to an open call for co-authors to share their knowledge and expertise.
Our aim was to write a high-quality book that provides a comprehensive, practical and authoritative guide to crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation projects in the cultural heritage sector. We want it to be an effective road map for cultural institutions hoping to use crowdsourcing for the first time, a resource for institutions already using crowdsourcing to benchmark their work, and a source of insights into the ‘behind the scenes’ work required for participatory projects.
We published this first version of our collaborative text to provide early access to our work, and to invite comment and discussion from anyone interested in crowdsourcing, citizen science, citizen history, digital / online volunteer projects, programmes, tools or platforms with cultural heritage collections.
We are aware that geographic, language and other factors limited those able to attend and thereby limited the range of examples, case studies and literature from practitioners and theorists we were able to draw upon, and wrote a period of open review into our initial proposal.
Because this is an early release, it’s not as polished as the PDF-based version. For example, the formatting that helped Case Studies and Perspectives stand out from the page has been lost. While we work on an update, we hope you’ll forgive these small issues in the name of providing access and the ability to comment on our text sooner rather than later.
We are were open for review!
Writing for diverse audiences from the varied perspectives represented in our group of collaborators is not easy, particularly when working remotely and within a limited time frame, so we asked early readers to comment on our book. To borrow a phrase from another community review project, we welcomed help in pointing out any places that may require additional explanation, or that may not be accessible to newcomers in those professions and fields. We’d always love to know how you might use the book or individual chapters in teaching, research and your own practice.
The review period for this publication closed on August 9, 2021. After this, we’ll begin re-editing to incorporate feedback (and fix oddities in referencing etc.) and produce our final version of the book.
Questions, comments?
Please feel free to email the project leads - Mia Ridge, Samantha Blickhan and Meghan Ferriter - via [email protected] (include ‘Collective Wisdom’ in the subject line) with any comments or questions you’d rather make privately.
