citizen history and its discontents
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Digital History seminar 18 November 2014 Mia Ridge (Open University/Trinity College Dublin) http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2014/11/13/tuesday-18-november-citizen-history-and-its-discontents/TRANSCRIPT
Citizen history and its discontents
Mia Ridge, Open University / Trinity College Dublin
@mia_out www.miaridge.com
18 November 2014
Senate House, London
IHR Seminar in Digital History
What is crowdsourcing?
'the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’ (Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson for Wired, 2006)
Cultural heritage crowdsourcing is...
...asking the public to undertake meaningful tasks related to cultural heritage collections in an environment where the activities and/or goals provide inherent rewards for participation. The project should contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest.
Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
Transforming input content into output content...
...via a powerful purpose and / or enjoyable tasks that people want to help you with
Citizen science
Version I: assisting scientists through participation in data processing tasks
Version II: Some definitions additionally include participation in data analysis and research design
Participatory project models
Contributory
the public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation
Collaborative
both active partners, but lead by organisation
Co-creative
all partners define goals together(Bonney et al, 2009,Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education
(CAISE)
Avocational history
• ‘amateur’ historians, sometimes with formal training or decades of experience
Communities of practice
• ‘Social learning systems’, knowledge acquired through participation
What is ‘a historian’?
American Historical Association (AHA) 'core competencies'
• the ability to engage in historical inquiry, research, and analysis;
• to practice historical empathy; • to understand the complex nature of the
historical record; • generate significant, open-ended questions
about the past and devise research strategies to answer them;
• to craft historical narrative and argument; • to practice historical thinking
Historical thinking
• Observation
• Sourcing
• Inferencing
• Evidence
• Question posing
• CorroborationBill Tally and Lauren B. Goldenberg, “Fostering Historical Thinking With Digitized
Primary Sources,” Journal of Research on Technology in Education
Examples
FreeBMD
Forums as communities of practice
Old Weather
Old Weather
Operation War Diary
Operation War Diary
Operation War Diary
Operation War Diary
Operation War Diary
Children of the Lodz Ghetto
Children of the Lodz Ghetto
Conclusions from case studies
• Exposure to historical material is powerful
• A critical mass of discussion is important
• Expert input in discussion is transformational
• The effect of the ‘absent expert’?
Competing models of ‘citizen history’
• Grassroots, self-organised projects
• ‘Accidentally’ citizen history projects
• Intentional citizen history projects
• Citizen history is the new crowdsourcing
• ‘Accidentally not quite citizen history projects’
Structural issues that undermine ‘citizen history’ projects
Thank you!
Mia Ridge, Open University/Trinity College Dublin
@mia_out The Library of Congress https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179923364/