Cross-posted from the British Library's Digital Scholarship blog…
[Update, March 2020: like so much else, our plans for the 'Collective Wisdom' project have been thrown out by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have an extension from our funders and will look to confirm dates when the global situation (especially around international flights) becomes clearer. In the meantime, the JISCMail Crowdsourcing list has some discussion on starting and managing projects in the current context.]
One of the key outcomes of our AHRC UK-US Partnership Development Grant, 'From crowdsourcing to digitally-enabled participation: the state of the art in collaboration, access, and inclusion for cultural heritage institutions', is the publication of an open access book written through a collaborative 'book sprint'. We'll work with up to 12 other collaborators 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. Could you be one of our collaborators? Read on!
The book sprint will be held at the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture from 19 – 24th April 2020. We've added a half-day debriefing session to the usual five day sprint, so that we can capture all the ideas that didn't make it into the book and start to shape the agenda for a follow-up workshop to be held at the British Library in October. Due to the pace of writing and facilitation, participants must be able to commit to five and a half days in order to attend.
We have some confirmed participants already – including representatives from FromThePage, King’s College London Department of Digital Humanities, the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science, and the Colored Conventions Project, plus the project investigators Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter (Library of Congress) and Sam Blickhan (Zooniverse) – with additional places to be filled by this open call for participation.
An open call enables us to include folk from a range of backgrounds and experiences. This matches the ethos of the book sprint model, which states that 'diversity in participants—perspectives, experience, job roles, ethnicity, gender—creates a better work dynamic and a better book'. Participants will have the opportunity to not only create this authoritative text, but to facilitate the formation of an online community of practice which will serve as a resource and support system for those engaging with crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation projects.
We're looking for participants who are enthusiastic, experienced and engaged, with expertise at any point in the life cycle of crowdsourcing and digital participation. Your expertise might have been gained through hands-on experience on projects or by conducting research in areas from co-creation with heritage organisations or community archives to HCI, human computation and CSCW. We have a generous definition of 'digitally-enabled participation', including not-entirely-digital volunteering projects around cultural heritage collections, and activities that go beyond typical collection-centric 'crowdsourcing' tasks like transcription, classification and description. Got questions? Please email digitalresearch@bl.uk!
How to apply
- Read the Book Sprint FAQs to make sure you're aware of the process and commitment required
- Fill in this short Google Form by midnight GMT February 26th
What happens next?
We'll review applications and let people know by the end of February 2020.
We're planning to book travel and accommodation for participants as soon as dates and attendance is confirmed – this helps keeps costs down and also means that individuals aren't out of pocket while waiting for reimbursement. The AHRC fund will pay for travel and accommodation for all book sprint participants. We will also host a follow up workshop at the British Library in October and hope to provide travel and accommodations for book sprint participants.
We'll be holding a pre-sprint video call (on March 18, 19 or 20) to put faces to names and think about topics that people might want to research in advance and collect as an annotated bibliography for use during the sprint.
If you can't make the book sprint but would still like to contribute, we've got you covered! We'll publish the first version of the book online for comment and feedback. Book sprints don't allow for remote participation, so this is our best way of including the vast amounts of expertise not in the room.
You can sign up to the British Library's crowdsourcing newsletters for updates, or join our Crowdsourcing group on Humanities Commons set up to share progress and engage in discussion with the wider community.
