Citizen History and its Discontents

Citizen history and its discontents

Mia Ridge, Open University / Trinity College Dublin

@mia_out www.miaridge.com

18 November 2014

Senate House, London

IHR Seminar in Digital History

What is crowdsourcing?

'the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’ (Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson for Wired, 2006)

Cultural heritage crowdsourcing is...

...asking the public to undertake meaningful tasks related to cultural heritage collections in an environment where the activities and/or goals provide inherent rewards for participation. The project should contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest.

Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage

Transforming input content into output content...

...via a powerful purpose and / or enjoyable tasks that people want to help you with

Citizen science

Version I: assisting scientists through participation in data processing tasks

Version II: Some definitions additionally include participation in data analysis and research design

Participatory project models

Contributory

the public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation

Collaborative

both active partners, but lead by organisation

Co-creative

all partners define goals together(Bonney et al, 2009,Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education

(CAISE)

Avocational history

• ‘amateur’ historians, sometimes with formal training or decades of experience

Communities of practice

• ‘Social learning systems’, knowledge acquired through participation

What is ‘a historian’?

American Historical Association (AHA) 'core competencies'

• the ability to engage in historical inquiry, research, and analysis;

• to practice historical empathy; • to understand the complex nature of the

historical record; • generate significant, open-ended questions

about the past and devise research strategies to answer them;

• to craft historical narrative and argument; • to practice historical thinking

Historical thinking

• Observation

• Sourcing

• Inferencing

• Evidence

• Question posing

• CorroborationBill Tally and Lauren B. Goldenberg, “Fostering Historical Thinking With Digitized

Primary Sources,” Journal of Research on Technology in Education

Examples

FreeBMD

Forums as communities of practice

Old Weather

Old Weather

Operation War Diary

Operation War Diary

Operation War Diary

Operation War Diary

Operation War Diary

Children of the Lodz Ghetto

Children of the Lodz Ghetto

Conclusions from case studies

• Exposure to historical material is powerful

• A critical mass of discussion is important

• Expert input in discussion is transformational

• The effect of the ‘absent expert’?

Competing models of ‘citizen history’

• Grassroots, self-organised projects

• ‘Accidentally’ citizen history projects

• Intentional citizen history projects

• Citizen history is the new crowdsourcing

• ‘Accidentally not quite citizen history projects’

Structural issues that undermine ‘citizen history’ projects

Thank you!

Mia Ridge, Open University/Trinity College Dublin

@mia_out The Library of Congress https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179923364/