Crowdsourcing – THATCamp Lehigh Valley 2013

Crowdsourcing links

Rob Weidman — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:57:35 +0000

Session Idea [Talk?]: Digital Archives & Humanities Research

Wade Linebaugh — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:45:21 +0000

I would like to propose a session that could involve a series of interrelated topics of discussion including copyright, open access to scholarly materials, and digitization of texts that evade most people’s regular access.

I am thinking, first, of two basic scholarly archives as exempla: The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) (www.modjourn.org) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) (eebo.chadwyck.com/home). Both archives are rich veins of materials that used to only be available to those with the best libraries (or the best research funding). Have these online archives indeed revolutionized the democratic availability of information? Have they continued to limit access only to those privileged with institutional membership?

To structure this session, I’m thinking of a few basic questions.

What goes into the creation of such projects?
How do we justify either open access or paywalls?
Do these archives indeed deliver a quality research experiences or might they falsely limit the scope of the curious student?
What happens when a crowdsourcing community wishes to participate in an editorial or curated project that resists such participation?
Does the prestige of creating such projects inhibit true exchange and development (i.e., the line on one’s CV as the founder of a database is different than becoming a contributor to someone else’s – is that a problem?)

At present, this is a set of ideas left purposefully hazy. My questions come out of my recent relationship to some of these scholarly archives and my curiosities about their future as research tools. Please help me develop & narrow this premise – I simply know that I’d like to do some group thinking about these archives and what they mean to humanities research.

Join the Crowd: Hands-On Digital Humanities Crowdsourcing [Play]

Rob Weidman — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:50:23 +0000

This is a companion “play” session to the “talk” on crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. In this session we would visit various sites and contribute by reviewing menus, tagging photos, transcribing letters, etc.

We could share our thoughts informally during the process and more formally in a “debriefing” after our group crowdsourcing session. This is seen as a companion to the talk on crowd sourcing, but the two sessions could be compressed into one if necessary.

Possible sites on which to “play”:

Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities [Talk]

Rob Weidman — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:47:07 +0000

Crowdsourcing is becoming more and more common in the digital humanities. Here is a sampling of projects which currently include crowdsourcing features:

I would be interested in a discussion of how crowdsourcing can be used in digital humanities projects. Topics of discussion could include:

How to implement crowdsourcing
Successes / Failures
Strengths / Weaknesses
Issues / Barriers

See also the proposal for a “play” crowdsourcing session.

Session Idea: [Talk/Make]: 50 Ways to be a FOSSer

Clif Kussmaul — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 12:43:32 +0000

Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) is distributed without charge and with the underlying source code, so that anyone can fix defects, update documentation, add enhancements, or otherwise modify the software and share the changes with others. Thus FOSS is free as in free speech, not free beer. Although many people associate FOSS with software development and Internet infrastructure, there are FOSS projects for any area of interest, including audio editing (Audacity), image processing (GIMP), library subject guides (SubjectsPlus), mind mapping (FreeMind), music notation (MuseScore), and project management (OpenWorkbench). Furthermore, a wiki or content management system can be customized to support teaching and scholarship (or other activities) across a wide variety of disciplines.

The communities that develop and support FOSS can be represented as layered onions or pyramids (Jensen & Scacchi, 2007). Typically, the largest, outermost group is people who use or monitor the project, but do not contribute to it. Within this group are progressively more active but smaller groups, such as users who share ideas and defect reports, developers who work on specific sub-projects or supporting modules, leaders of sub-projects, and finally the overall project leaders and core developers. Thus, FOSS communities are communities of practice that leverage legitimate peripheral participation. Although many FOSS participants have technical backgrounds and skills, most FOSS projects also involve non-programming work – graphic design, testing, documentation – and the projects benefit from participation by a more diverse community of people.

Participating in FOSS helps students gain experience with professional reading and writing, diverse and distributed teams, and managing and prioritizing work in extended projects. FOSS can also help students shift from being reactive (complete assigned work) to more proactive (decide what is most important and take ownership). Thus, faculty at many institutions are working to involve students in FOSS (e.g. SoftHum; Teaching Open Source). At one recent NSF-sponsored workshop, a group of faculty, students, and other FOSS participants drafted a list of ~100 activities that could contribute to FOSS projects and provide useful experiences for students and faculty (50 Ways to be a FOSSer).

I envision this session as seeking to:

Review and expand the list of FOSS activities.
Identify activities of particular relevance and value to teachers, students, and other humanists.
Develop descriptions, instructions, and supporting materials to make it easier to adapt and adopt these activities in a variety of courses and contexts.

References

Jensen, C., and Scacchi, W. 2007. Role migration and advancement processes in OSSD projects: A comparative case study. In Proc of the 29th Int’l Conf on Software Engineering, 364-374. IEEE Computer Society.
50 Ways to be a FOSSer (activity list).
xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.php?id=f:50ways
SoftHum: Software for Humanity.
xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.ph
Teaching Open Source.
http:// teachingopensource.org