I believe that crowd sourcing history is one of the most fascinating aspects of public history, and one that is the most ready for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking.
I've been following NARA's Citizen Archivist project for the past couple of years. This is incredibly important work. Computer programs are able to convert most type-written text into searchable text these days, but most historical documents are difficult for computers to handle. Handwritten text, text that is somewhat blurred from damage to the paper, or other more complicated documents cannot be auto-scanned in this way. There are thousands of people in the world who would love to have the opportunity to volunteer on a worthy project like this, though.
One of the best uses of crowd sourcing history that I have found is for tagging photos. This is a task that is more difficult for computers to do than converting text to searchable text, and it is something that humans can do very quickly and easily. Tagged photos allow researchers to quickly search through large databases to find what they need. I would like to see more projects that partner with descendant communities of the subjects of the photos, such as immigrant communities, indigenous groups, etc, to tag the photos using their cultural and historical knowledge. There are many opportunities for these types of partnerships with museums and archives today.
There are two issues that make it difficult to create these crowd sourcing projects, though. First, most museums and archives do not have the manpower or budget to create high quality scans to upload to the internet to begin these projects. Having worked on digitization projects myself, I know that it takes an incredibly large number of hours to do and the machines are very expensive. The majority of museums and archives in the U.S. have a hard time just cataloging and caring for what they have in their collections. They certainly don't have time to digitize it, as well.
Second, the technology platforms for starting a project like NARA's Citizen Archivist project are difficult to program and out of reach for most museums and archives. If the platform does not run smoothly and the user interface is not intuitive and easy to use, volunteers will not want to work on the project. I did find this platform that is already designed and available at a cost to institutions: https://fromthepage.com/software. However, the cost plus the internal employee manpower needed for these projects still puts this out of reach for most institutions.
When I was looking for other examples of history crowd sourcing for this unit, I came across this lovely Wikipedia page (a very meta example, a crowd-sourced list of crowd sourcing within a crowd-sourced project; and yes, Wikipedia is on the list): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects. It includes many examples of history-focused projects. Some of the ones that interested me were:
-Historic Cambridge Newspaper Collection
Right on the homepage it has a list of the top text correctors, which is a nice way to encourage participation. Here is the link to how to edit the text: https://cambridge.dlconsulting.com/?a=p&p=help&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------#correcttext
-Colored Conventions Transcribe Minutes Project
This project is not active at the moment, but the work from the project can be seen here: http://coloredconventions.org/transcribe-minutes
-The Historical Marker Database
https://www.hmdb.org/
-DIY History by the University of Iowa
http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
-Shakespeare's World
A historical document transcription project focusing on documents from Shakespeare's contemporaries: https://www.shakespearesworld.org/#/
For my final project, I am working to complete all pages and text this week so that next week can solely be for any last edits and revising.
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