New project, and a call for participation!

Cross-posted from the British Library's Digital Scholarship blog…

I'm excited to announce that we – Mia Ridge (British Library), Meghan Ferriter (Library of Congress) and Sam Blickhan (Zooniverse) – have been awarded an AHRC UK-US Partnership Development Grant. Our overarching goals are:

• To foster an international community of practice in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage (if you're reading this, that probably includes you!)
• To capture and disseminate the state of the art and promote knowledge exchange in crowdsourcing and digitally-enabled participation
• To set a research agenda and generate shared understandings of unsolved or tricky problems that could lead to future funding applications

We've written a blog post that explains how we're planning to achieve those goals – https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/02/new-project-from-crowdsourcing-to-digitally-enabled-participation-the-state-of-the-art-in-collaborat.html – and more importantly, how you can get involved.

We're holding a five day collaborative 'book sprint' (or writing workshop) at the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture from 19 – 24th April 2020. Working with up to 12 other collaborators, we'll 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 to provide an effective road map for cultural institutions hoping to use crowdsourcing for the first time and a resource for institutions already using crowdsourcing to benchmark their work. 

Could you be one of those collaborators? We're looking for book sprint 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. 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

1. Read Call for participants: April 2020 book sprint on the state of the art in crowdsourcing in cultural heritage
2. Read the Book Sprint FAQs to make sure you're aware of the process and commitment required
3. Fill in this short Google Form by midnight GMT February 21st

We'll review applications and let people know by February 25th, 2020.  

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 can't accomodate 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.