***Deadline for expressions of interest extended to 30th October 17:00 UTC.***

You put your images in, your data come out – that’s what crowdsourcing’s all about! It sounds simple but there are many hurdles to cross after a citizen research project comes to an end. Express your interest to join us at an online workshop exploring the crowdsourced data cycle in cultural heritage organisations hosted by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

What: After the crowds disperse: crowdsourced data rediscovered and researched

Where: Zoom hosted by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

When: Tuesday 1st December 2020 13:30 – 16:00 UTC


http://data.rbge.org.uk/herb/E00024207© Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 2020 CC BY 4.0 license. The Dreadnought, 104 Guns, until recently lying off Greenwich (repro ID pu6061). By Edward William Cooke, circa 1857. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. South elevation of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, The National Archives (WORK 31/221). © Crown copyright. Page from the minute book, The National Archives  (WO 250/436, p. 252). © Crown copyright.

This participatory workshop is part of the AHRC-funded Engaging Crowds project, which sits within the AHRC programme: Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World. It is organised by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, in collaboration with The National Archives, Royal Museums Greenwich and Zooniverse at the University of Oxford.

Over the past decade, cultural heritage organisations have increasingly turned to volunteers through crowdsourcing platforms to help make their holdings digitally accessible for discovery and research. These platforms have proved to be highly successful, both in attracting and retaining the interest of volunteers, and in the rate and quality of data collected. They have provided a new and deeper level of engagement  and attracted more diverse audiences to national collections. However, there are still significant hurdles to overcome to achieve seamless movement of data between institutional collection management systems (CMS) and crowdsourcing platforms and back again. For example, crowdsourcing platform data export structures can be a barrier to re-ingestion when they differ from the data structures used within organisations. If crowdsourcing is to fulfil the potential of its generous volunteers this break in the data cycle must be closed.

In this interdisciplinary workshop we will navigate the post-project data flow including aspects of: quality control requirements, reusability analysis, ingestion into content management and discovery systems and subsequent reuse of the data.  

The workshop will be structured in two halves: the first will focus on the barriers and practical implications for data re-ingestion and subsequent data reusability through a series of presentations from perspectives across our cultural heritage sector. In the second half participants will work in small interdisciplinary groups to consider questions that will explore how to close the gap between data extraction and rediscovery. 

In order to examine these questions, we welcome expressions of interest from cultural heritage practitioners and researchers from a range of disciplines including historians, curators and collections specialists, anyone whose research engages with collections, web designers, Collection Management System (CMS) developers, citizen research platform developers, data scientists, Human-Computer Interaction researchers, social scientists, and more, who work within the heritage, academic, industrial, or third sectors.


Express your interest

If you are interested in participating, please send a short summary (not more than 200 words) of your professional or research interests, expertise, and motivation for attending the workshop to digitisation@rbge.org.uk, with ‘After the crowds disperse’ in the subject line.

The deadline for expressions of interest extended to 30th October 17:00 UTC.

Participants will be selected depending on professional or research background and interests to create a balanced interdisciplinary workshop and will be contacted by 17:00 UTC on Monday 2nd November.

Spaces are free but they are limited. 


Tags

data aggregators, data harvesting, data ingestion, data migration, national collections, accessibility