Session on “Experts” and the Crowd

Random notes (lightly edited) by Anne Whisnant

Some key issues:

• Public/user participation in creating/tagging content for digital exhibits
• Public/user contribution of content to digital history sites
• Issue of an institution’s reputation for expertise, the public’s desire that things be “right,” and how it would look if “wrong” materials were posted by “crowd”?
• Ways to make transparent the contributions from the “crowd” vs those of “experts”?
• How to manage the public interactional components of public history work:  responding, moderating, etc.  Very time/labor intensive.  Institutions need to be responsive for this to work.
• Use of outside sites like Flickr for public to post things sometimes works better.
• Copyright/rights issues unresolved.
• Pedagogy/student involvement in creating content for digital projects and how to deal with erroneous material that gets introduced.
• Why are we encouraging/worrying about public involvement?  What is our purpose?
• Has Wikipedia solved some of these issues of authority/documentation?  But most Wikipedia editors are men; line has leveled off; little scholarly input.
• How to set things up for student input that “asks the right questions” and gives clear instructions and training/web interface setup to “stop” them when entering erroneous metadata.
• Issues of process AND product are intertwined.  Need discussion on the process, thoughtful consideration of workflow and embedding “teachable” moments into it so that student/public participants learn something about history, and the process of doing history, while contributing.
• Public also often interested in accuracy of data and facts, too.
• What conversation is going on in libraries about all of this fluidity and participatory content co-creation? Movement of “radical librarians” pertinent to this.
• How to bring in older/less digitally fluent populations into this participation?
• How to take what we as “experts”  bring and connect it to people.
• Transparency needed; being able to say here is what we are struggling with; let people see the struggles you are dealing with.  Our ability to moderate the process is critical.
• Wd be great to have librarians, public historians, anthropologists (who think a lot about how communities work) talking to each other more.
• Are librarians public historians?  Do they think of themselves this way?
• Is digital history really public history?  Sometimes public history grad students don’t recognize digital history as public history!

Some Resources Mentioned:

I also posted this as a “comment” on Cathy’s post, but suddenly wasn’t sure if I needed to be logged in to post it that way (which I wasn’t).  So, sorry for the repetition, but this is a response to Cathy’s post:

Cathy, I have seen some exciting things done with Google Maps/Earth API to create the kind of thing you are talking about (not that I know, really, how to do it), but we might look at some of the possibilities together: code.google.com/apis/earth/documentation/examples.html

Also, did you see this site dealing with visual depictions of what was there in the past? posterityproject.blogspot.com/2011/04/whatwasthere-maps-your-journey-to-past.html