The Collective Wisdom is led by Principal Investigator Mia Ridge (British Library) and Co-Investigators Meghan Ferriter (Library of Congress) and Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse).
Our book sprint participants are (in alphabetical order): Austin Mast, Ben Brumfield, Brendon Wilkins, Daria Cybulska, Denise Burgher, Jim Casey, Kurt Luther, Michael Haley Goldman, Nick White, Pip Willcox, Sara Brumfield, Sonya J Coleman and Ylva Berglund Prytz.
Participants were selected following a competitive open call.
Our Book Sprints facilitator was Faith Bosworth.
About us
Project leaders
Mia Ridge is the British Library's Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. She's been researching and building crowdsourcing tools for cultural heritage collections for over a decade. She blogs at Open Objects.
Samantha Blickhan is the Humanities Lead for Zooniverse, where she leads research and tool development for GLAM & Humanities crowdsourcing projects.
Meghan Ferriter is a Senior Innovation Specialist with LC Labs. She's welcomed volunteers, supported staff, and designed crowdsourcing projects at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress.
Book sprint participants
Kurt Luther is Associate Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) History at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Crowd Intelligence Lab.
Daria Cybulska is the Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, the national charity for the global Wikimedia movement, where we enable people and organisations to contribute to a shared understanding of the world through the creation of open knowledge. She's been a part of the Wikimedia movement for 9 years.
Michael Haley Goldman is the Director of Future Projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Crowd projects at the USHMM have focused on serving as active learning environments for participants.
Ylva Berglund Prytz is based at the University of Oxford where she runs and supports community collections and other crowdsourcing initiatives, many focussing on objects and stories from WW1.
Austin Mast is Professor of Biological Science at Florida State University, Director of iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Citizen Science Domain, and Board Member of the Citizen Science Association. He focuses on the creation and use of digital data by the world’s natural heritage collections, where an estimated 3 billion plants on sheets, insects on pins, fossils in drawers, fish in jars, and other collections are curated.
Nick White is the Web Developer / Librarian at the Newberry Library, where he develops and maintains the web architecture for the Newberry's Digital Initiatives.
Ben Brumfield founded the cultural heritage crowdsourcing platform FromThePage in 2005 and has been covering developments within crowdsourced manuscript transcription since 2007. Over the past decade, FromThePage has been used by libraries, archives, and museums to transcribe material ranging from Arabic scientific manuscripts to Aztec codices.
Sara Brumfield is a software engineer with a degrees in Computer Science and the Study of Women and Gender from Rice University. She's half of Brumfield Labs, a digital humanities consultancy. Their product, FromThePage, is a collaborative transcription platform for handwritten historical documents. Prior to founding FromThePage, she spent 20+ years working at IBM and assorted startups in a variety of technical roles.
Jim Casey is an assistant professor of African American Studies and managing director of the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University. He is co-director of the Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day.
Brendon Wilkins is co-founder and projects director of DigVentures, a collaborative platform enabling civic participation in archaeology and heritage projects. He is currently finalising a practice-based PhD at the University of Leicester School of Museum Studies, entitled 'Digging the Crowd: the future for archaeology in the digital and collaborative economy.’
Sonya Coleman has worked at the Library of Virginia since 2011, currently as the Digital Engagement and Social Media Coordinator. She works on the Library’s crowdsourcing projects, such as Making History: Transcribe, and seeks to engage the public through social media and online content. Her primary interests are accessibility, innovation, and connection.
Denise Burgher is a senior team leader at the Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day both housed in the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State. As the Chair of Historic Churches and community engagement and the co chair of the Curriculum Team she has been deeply involved with crowdsourcing and developing compelling initiatives for community engagement.
