The ethics of volunteer crowdsourcing
October 24, 2018 11:31 AM Subscribe
Acknowledging the irony of posing this question here… What's the status of debate in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) sphere on the ethics of volunteer crowdsourcing? Are there any guidelines? Especially thinking about things like transcription/tagging, i.e. where the tasks are predefined and often rote, rather than something like Wikipedia, where the volunteers can define the tasks.
Most relevant thing I've found is this piece "Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities" from 2016, which mainly concludes in favor of its value for engaging the public.
Most relevant thing I've found is this piece "Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities" from 2016, which mainly concludes in favor of its value for engaging the public.
We had a big workshop on this at the annual Digital Humanities international conference a few years ago with representation from most of the big long-term crowdsourcing projects, academics, museums and libraries. The notes were saved in a public Google Doc.
posted by lollusc at 2:50 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by lollusc at 2:50 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
(The list of participants on that document were not all the participants at the workshop. If I recall rightly, they were the ones who contributed to the notes for this topic. The workshop covered a number of other topics around crowdsourcing too, so we split up the labour of documenting it.)
posted by lollusc at 2:52 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by lollusc at 2:52 PM on October 24, 2018
(And finally, if you are interested in any of the other aspects of crowdsourcing, I found the mother-document with links to the notes from all the different topics in it.)
posted by lollusc at 2:59 PM on October 24, 2018
posted by lollusc at 2:59 PM on October 24, 2018
Having been on both sides of museum crowdsourcing (as an institution putting stuff out there, and as someone who has done voluntary transcription), I can tell you that the volunteers I have interacted with express a fairly strong preference for working on projects where the results of their work are freely available online/open access, and not behind a paywall. Check out Siobhan Leachman, who is active as a volunteer on multiple transcription projects as well as wikipedia. Here she is on twitter; you can find her other places. She was a contributor to this article.
posted by gudrun at 6:03 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by gudrun at 6:03 AM on October 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
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I think you've found a good piece to start with - the digital humanities world will probably have more discussion of this . You might try looking at the dh + lib blog for more material.
The most recent conversations I've heard of that seem relevant center on either 1) questions of power and privilege relating to digitizing certain materials and collections. That is, if we are curating for our (very white) library a collection materials from a marginalized community - how messed up is it to expect "volunteers" to help us with those collections? Questions of ownership/control/etc. relating to "post-custodial archives" might have some discussion of this.
And 2) less about the volunteer aspect and more about the platforms maybe - some institutions have used tools like Amazon Mechanical Turk for recruiting folks. This now widely recognized as really problematic (but wasn't always) so you might find some discussions along those lines.
posted by pantarei70 at 12:22 PM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]