A Museum without Walls: Realising the Potential of Crowdsourcing in the Arts
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Oxford Internet Institute
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to explore the impact of new information and communications technologies on public interaction with and awareness of publicly-owned works of art in museum collections. The focus of the research project is a case study, YourPaintings Tagger, an important new crowdsourcing initiative in the Arts and Humanities. YourPaintings is a major new digital art collection from the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), comprising digital images of 200,000 publicly-held oil paintings in the UK, 80% of which are currently not on public display. This exciting new resource will be completed in 2012 and mounted on the BBC website, where the collection will be freely available to all. In advance of its public launch, YourPaintings is embarking on a crowdsourcing initiative to create and enhance metadata for the collection. The YourPaintings Tagger will ask the public to provide supporting information for the digital images, from simple descriptive tags to information about sitters, locations and artists. By monitoring the usage and impact of this initiative from the ground up, the project will consider the potential of crowdsourcing techniques in the Arts and Humanities.
Crowdsourcing initiatives have become increasingly popular means of generating content and analysis from large data sets. They have many advantages, offering a cost-effective means of adding or engaging with content, bringing researchers into contact with the public in innovative and involving ways, and generating interest in and access to scientific and cultural resources that can be hidden from public view. These initiatives are also politically timely, as they conform to the government's drive towards a 'Big Society', in which 'people power' is harnessed to enhance community resources. Thus far they have primarily been located within the sciences, with successful initiatives such as Galaxy Zoo, e-Bird and Foldit leading the way. These techniques are now spreading to the Arts and Humanities, with manuscript projects such as Transcribe Bentham and Old Weather now in their early stages. YourPaintings Tagger is an innovative attempt to bring crowdsourcing to the Arts via a major publicly owned cultural heritage resource, and to introduce the strategy of asking for community contributed content as an integral part of resource development. In addition to analysing a large data set that will be a crucial addition to the research community, publicly contributed metadata will allow all visitors to the YourPaintings site to search and discover the collection.
This project will examine the impact of this crowdsourcing initiative in the Arts and Humanities community, asking whether it succeeds in encouraging the public to contribute quality data, and investigating what impact this data has on the digital resource YourPaintings. It will look at user communities, how users contribute data, what kind of data they contribute, and how this data is viewed by different (expert and non-expert) users. It will look at communities, both of resources and of people, to show how these intersect with one another and how YourPaintings Tagger impacts upon them.
The results of the research will be disseminated to the widest possible audience, through traditional academic outputs such as conference and seminar papers, peer-reviewed publications, a project website and workshop, as well as through contacts with policy and third sector organisations facilitated by project partners at the PCF and BBC. Discussion of methods used to conduct the research will be contributed to the JISC-funded Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources together with guides to any new techniques or methods developed during the research project. This free resource can be found at www.microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr.
Crowdsourcing initiatives have become increasingly popular means of generating content and analysis from large data sets. They have many advantages, offering a cost-effective means of adding or engaging with content, bringing researchers into contact with the public in innovative and involving ways, and generating interest in and access to scientific and cultural resources that can be hidden from public view. These initiatives are also politically timely, as they conform to the government's drive towards a 'Big Society', in which 'people power' is harnessed to enhance community resources. Thus far they have primarily been located within the sciences, with successful initiatives such as Galaxy Zoo, e-Bird and Foldit leading the way. These techniques are now spreading to the Arts and Humanities, with manuscript projects such as Transcribe Bentham and Old Weather now in their early stages. YourPaintings Tagger is an innovative attempt to bring crowdsourcing to the Arts via a major publicly owned cultural heritage resource, and to introduce the strategy of asking for community contributed content as an integral part of resource development. In addition to analysing a large data set that will be a crucial addition to the research community, publicly contributed metadata will allow all visitors to the YourPaintings site to search and discover the collection.
This project will examine the impact of this crowdsourcing initiative in the Arts and Humanities community, asking whether it succeeds in encouraging the public to contribute quality data, and investigating what impact this data has on the digital resource YourPaintings. It will look at user communities, how users contribute data, what kind of data they contribute, and how this data is viewed by different (expert and non-expert) users. It will look at communities, both of resources and of people, to show how these intersect with one another and how YourPaintings Tagger impacts upon them.
The results of the research will be disseminated to the widest possible audience, through traditional academic outputs such as conference and seminar papers, peer-reviewed publications, a project website and workshop, as well as through contacts with policy and third sector organisations facilitated by project partners at the PCF and BBC. Discussion of methods used to conduct the research will be contributed to the JISC-funded Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources together with guides to any new techniques or methods developed during the research project. This free resource can be found at www.microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr.
Planned Impact
Besides the academic beneficiaries detailed above, the project will have a significant impact on three main groups:
The Research Community
Previous work by the Investigator in this area has both benefited greatly and created greater impact through connections to wider research networks (such as bloggers, professional communities and a range of practitioners outside academia), facilitated by online networks. While project workshops such as the one proposed are an essential means of meeting, sharing and debating with colleagues from a range of disciplines, online networks can reach a greater audience and create cost-effective and sustainable connections and communities. The Investigator will reach out to these audiences through the project website, and through content contributed to the JISC-funded Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources: www.microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr. The Toolkit continues to be cited and used by JISC in funded projects across a range of disciplines involving both academic and non-academic groups.
The General Public
The resources at the heart of this study are publicly owned and will be co-created by the public. The Investigator will work closely with key project partners the PCF and the BBC who have supported the proposed project to maximise public engagement with these resources. The project partners will keep in regular contact with the Investigator and the project, and will have the opportunity to apply lessons learned during the project directly to the resources, benefiting all users.
While this case study focuses on crowdsourcing within the Arts, insights gained can be applied to the application of such techniques across disciplines, and will therefore benefit a wide range of resources and collections of interest to the general public. In order to ensure the widest possible impact in these areas, the results of the project will be widely disseminated and information about the methods used will be freely available via the TIDSR toolkit.
Initiatives such as YourPaintings Tagger have the opportunity to transform opportunities for knowledge transfer, a key aspect of any institution's role. Recent JISC-funded work has suggested that user-generated content and citizen science projects have the potential to create opportunities for knowledge exchange, creating the potential for two-way enrichment of research by facilitating meaningful contact between researchers and the general public. The Galaxy Zoo project has shown the potential of this type of knowledge exchange, by recruiting the general public to contribute to both general and specific research questions. This research project will contribute to research into whether such a model can succeed in an Arts and Humanities setting, and point to a future of more interactive and enriching knowledge exchange endeavours.
High quality digital resources can be very expensive to create, whereas user-generated content can be relatively cheaply acquired, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional forms of tagging and cataloguing. If this model is successful, it could be applied in a wide range of settings, aiding the development of high-quality, inclusive and educational resources to which the general public will be actively encouraged to contribute.
The Public Sector
The results of this project have the potential to influence policy in funding councils and charities, a major source of funding for the creation of digital resources. There has been considerable interest in the potential and actual impact of community generated content and citizen science projects from funding councils, as a potentially cost-effective and mutually beneficial source of data and education. This research will provide a test case of crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities which will demonstrate how to provide accurate metrics of such initiatives, and will consider the educational, social and cultural contexts of such contributions.
The Research Community
Previous work by the Investigator in this area has both benefited greatly and created greater impact through connections to wider research networks (such as bloggers, professional communities and a range of practitioners outside academia), facilitated by online networks. While project workshops such as the one proposed are an essential means of meeting, sharing and debating with colleagues from a range of disciplines, online networks can reach a greater audience and create cost-effective and sustainable connections and communities. The Investigator will reach out to these audiences through the project website, and through content contributed to the JISC-funded Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources: www.microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr. The Toolkit continues to be cited and used by JISC in funded projects across a range of disciplines involving both academic and non-academic groups.
The General Public
The resources at the heart of this study are publicly owned and will be co-created by the public. The Investigator will work closely with key project partners the PCF and the BBC who have supported the proposed project to maximise public engagement with these resources. The project partners will keep in regular contact with the Investigator and the project, and will have the opportunity to apply lessons learned during the project directly to the resources, benefiting all users.
While this case study focuses on crowdsourcing within the Arts, insights gained can be applied to the application of such techniques across disciplines, and will therefore benefit a wide range of resources and collections of interest to the general public. In order to ensure the widest possible impact in these areas, the results of the project will be widely disseminated and information about the methods used will be freely available via the TIDSR toolkit.
Initiatives such as YourPaintings Tagger have the opportunity to transform opportunities for knowledge transfer, a key aspect of any institution's role. Recent JISC-funded work has suggested that user-generated content and citizen science projects have the potential to create opportunities for knowledge exchange, creating the potential for two-way enrichment of research by facilitating meaningful contact between researchers and the general public. The Galaxy Zoo project has shown the potential of this type of knowledge exchange, by recruiting the general public to contribute to both general and specific research questions. This research project will contribute to research into whether such a model can succeed in an Arts and Humanities setting, and point to a future of more interactive and enriching knowledge exchange endeavours.
High quality digital resources can be very expensive to create, whereas user-generated content can be relatively cheaply acquired, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional forms of tagging and cataloguing. If this model is successful, it could be applied in a wide range of settings, aiding the development of high-quality, inclusive and educational resources to which the general public will be actively encouraged to contribute.
The Public Sector
The results of this project have the potential to influence policy in funding councils and charities, a major source of funding for the creation of digital resources. There has been considerable interest in the potential and actual impact of community generated content and citizen science projects from funding councils, as a potentially cost-effective and mutually beneficial source of data and education. This research will provide a test case of crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities which will demonstrate how to provide accurate metrics of such initiatives, and will consider the educational, social and cultural contexts of such contributions.
| Description | The project was designed to understand the impact of crowdsourcing on a digital resource (Your Paintings), with the idea of drawing out the success or otherwise of crowdsourcing as a strategy for adding vital metadata to the collection and engaging users. The project found that although productivity levels were below what the project architects had hoped for, the crowdsourcing was generating high quality tags and had a small but dedicated audience of contributors (Taggers) including a group of super contributors who were responsible for the majority of the tagging work. The project found that the motivations for contributions were similar to other (quite different subject area) crowdsourcing projects such as Galaxy Zoo, with the addition of it having been identified as a useful teaching resource. There was also evidence of the relationship between tagging and wellbeing in many of the contributors, and the ways in which 'virtual volunteering' as part of a (in this case cultural heritage) crowdsourcing project could become a valuable means of remaining connected to a meaningful task and collection where traditional volunteering was not an option. |
| Exploitation Route | I intend to take these findings forward through collaborative work with colleagues in Psychology to investigate the relationship between 'tagging' and wellbeing. My findings contribute to a picture that is being built up of the potential for understanding engagement with cultural heritage through technology, the impact of crowdsourcing on volunteers (particularly wellbeing), and the potential for formal and informal education through crowdsourcing. These findings are relevant to anyone in the GLAM sector, or anyone with interests in digital cultural heritage or crowdsourcing. The findings from this award have led to ongoing collaborative work with the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector, particularly the University of Oxford's museums, around the themes of engagement, wellbeing, impact and visitor experience. In particular, in 2015, we were successful in being awarded funding to develop an online platform to engage students with museum objects as part of core undergraduate teaching, in which we encourage students to 'tag' and annotate objects as part of their learning. This experimental platform draws directly on initial findings from the 'A Museum without Walls' project, and analysis of engagement through this new platform will lead to further research outputs. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=138 |
| Description | The main impact of my findings has been to advise and generate discussion in the cultural sector, which has been the main target audience of my research dissemination beyond the academy. I have given numerous talks at conferences and workshops on understanding usage and impact, with particular reference to crowdsourcing, and have become an adviser to cultural institutions interested in understanding crowdsourcing and how it may be used. For instance, I have worked with the Happy Museum organisation to develop methods for using crowdsourcing to gather data on visitor engagement and wellbeing in cultural spaces. I have also received funding to support knowledge exchange workshops to enable the sharing of methods and project data involving impact and visitor engagement, and to enhance contact between the cultural/museums/heritage sector and academia. I have disseminated my findings to the broad range of stakeholders interested in crowdsourcing, including the scientific and gaming communities, and to library professionals interested in applying crowdsourcing to their collections, as evidence of what impact crowdsourcing can have at the individual level. I have also used my findings to develop an ongoing project which engages university students with objects (through tagging) in virtual collections drawn from across the GLAM collections at the University of Oxford. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2013 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |
| Description | ESRC Impact Acceleration Account: Knowledge Exchange Dialogues Scheme |
| Amount | £2,475 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | 1705-DIAL-297 |
| Organisation | Economic and Social Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2017 |
| End | 04/2018 |
| Description | University of Oxford IT Innovation Fund |
| Amount | £64,979 (GBP) |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2015 |
| End | 03/2017 |
| Description | University of Oxford Returning Carers' Scheme |
| Amount | £4,816 (GBP) |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2015 |
| End | 04/2016 |
| Description | Cabinet team partnership |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Department | Ashmolean Museum |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | My AHRC research project generated some important findings around the potential for formal and informal learning through the collection of metadata and meaning via digital platforms. This led to some introductions and discussions with the University museums in Oxford, and to a flourishing partnership that has seen us collaborate on a joint research/teaching project to put into practice some of what I learned during my AHRC research project, and create new research data. This partnership is mutually beneficial, showing the value and importance of the museums' collections to core undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the University by linking this to an ongoing research agenda which delivers data on the usage and impact of the digital platform. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Our partners have provided access to their collections and their expertise, enabling us to take this research agenda forward through a collaborative digital project, and building upon the knowledge gained through my AHRC grant. The collections are key to the project, and it simply wouldn't exist without their input. |
| Impact | The main outcome of this collaboration has been a grant from the University of Oxford's IT Innovation fund in order to develop the 'Cabinet' platform for teaching and research. This collaboration is multidisciplinary, involving the museums and collections, the History Faculty at the University of Oxford (Humanities), and the Oxford Internet Institute (Social Sciences). |
| Start Year | 2015 |
| Description | Cabinet team partnership |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Department | Museum of the History of Science, Oxford |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | My AHRC research project generated some important findings around the potential for formal and informal learning through the collection of metadata and meaning via digital platforms. This led to some introductions and discussions with the University museums in Oxford, and to a flourishing partnership that has seen us collaborate on a joint research/teaching project to put into practice some of what I learned during my AHRC research project, and create new research data. This partnership is mutually beneficial, showing the value and importance of the museums' collections to core undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in the University by linking this to an ongoing research agenda which delivers data on the usage and impact of the digital platform. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Our partners have provided access to their collections and their expertise, enabling us to take this research agenda forward through a collaborative digital project, and building upon the knowledge gained through my AHRC grant. The collections are key to the project, and it simply wouldn't exist without their input. |
| Impact | The main outcome of this collaboration has been a grant from the University of Oxford's IT Innovation fund in order to develop the 'Cabinet' platform for teaching and research. This collaboration is multidisciplinary, involving the museums and collections, the History Faculty at the University of Oxford (Humanities), and the Oxford Internet Institute (Social Sciences). |
| Start Year | 2015 |
| Description | Question of Measurement Knowledge Exchange Dialogues group |
| Organisation | M.B Associates |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | I have ongoing interests in measuring and understanding the impact of public engagement with arts and heritage. As a result, I have organised a series of workshops with these partners (and a wider group of interested organisations) to survey existing methods for understanding impact and engagement, and to bring academics and practitioners using new methods into the conversation. The workshops are ongoing, but we hope that at least one concrete outcome will be a shared knowledge bank, and greater understanding of new methods and projects in this arena. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The partners have been crucial to this set of workshops. MB Associates drew in organisations from the arts and museums sector with which they had previously worked, and my National Trust partner (a KTP Associate working jointly between the NT and the University of Oxford) was able to draw in relevant colleagues from within the Trust and beyond (in the wider heritage sector). The partners were trusted collaborators with the wider community, and this trust was essential in attracting the community to the workshops, and in creating the right environment for open dialogue. |
| Impact | No outcomes yet, as the workshops are still in progress. |
| Start Year | 2013 |
| Description | Question of Measurement Knowledge Exchange Dialogues group |
| Organisation | National Trust |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | I have ongoing interests in measuring and understanding the impact of public engagement with arts and heritage. As a result, I have organised a series of workshops with these partners (and a wider group of interested organisations) to survey existing methods for understanding impact and engagement, and to bring academics and practitioners using new methods into the conversation. The workshops are ongoing, but we hope that at least one concrete outcome will be a shared knowledge bank, and greater understanding of new methods and projects in this arena. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The partners have been crucial to this set of workshops. MB Associates drew in organisations from the arts and museums sector with which they had previously worked, and my National Trust partner (a KTP Associate working jointly between the NT and the University of Oxford) was able to draw in relevant colleagues from within the Trust and beyond (in the wider heritage sector). The partners were trusted collaborators with the wider community, and this trust was essential in attracting the community to the workshops, and in creating the right environment for open dialogue. |
| Impact | No outcomes yet, as the workshops are still in progress. |
| Start Year | 2013 |
| Description | Ashmolean Live Friday Public Engagement activity |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This Live Friday event was a demonstration of research activity being supported or celebrated via TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, as part of the Festival Finale of the Being Human Festival. Though the evening was named 'Fright Friday', the themes of the Being Human Festival were 'Hope' and 'Fear', so we chose paintings from the Ashmolean/ArtUK collection (formerly Your Paintings) representing these themes, and asked members of the public to tag them using sticky notes. The aim was to demonstrate how crowdsourcing works, why it is effective, and to showcase some of the findings from the original AHRC project around tagging and wellbeing. The most striking outcomes from this demonstration were the extent to which we appealed to younger children (in particular, boys under 12) many of whom spent more than 15 minutes tagging, and an invitation to participate in the next Live Friday event around multilingualism (in January 2017). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://torch.ox.ac.uk/frightfriday |
| Description | Ashmolean Live Friday event - LinguaMania |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | As a result of our previous Live Friday event in November 2016, part of the Being Human festival, we were invited to take part in the AHRC funded Creative Multilingualism event 'LinguaMania', staging our live 'tagging' or crowdsourcing event with replicas of oil paintings from the Ashmolean/ArtUK (formerly Your Paintings). On this occasion we invited visitors to tag in any language, in an effort to see how many languages we could collect by the end of the night (we are still analysing this data). This was by far our most successful 'live tagging' event, in terms of the number of visitors who participated, and generated some fascinating conversations about the richness of language. We found that, like our previous events, the tagging was particularly successful with children, who spent 10-15 minutes each creating a set of (rather than one or two) tags. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/linguamania |
| Description | Ashmolean Museum Live Friday event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | I created a 'live tagging' installation at the Ashmolean Museum's Live Friday event in May 2015. The idea was to demonstrate how crowdsourcing descriptive metadata from the public works (frequency of terms, different words for same item etc), to allow people to understand how they could contribute to tagging, and to disseminate some of the results of the project (tagging has an impact on wellbeing and language skills). Live Friday events typically attract a very broad audience, and we had over 4,500 members of the public in the museum during the evening. I spoke to a large number of members of the public that evening, and there was a lively discussion around the tagging process. I subsequently used this model for teaching visiting doctoral students which was a huge success and has really shaped my own teaching practices. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.ashmolean.org/livefriday/2015-05/ |
| Description | Media interest (Guardian) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | My article sparked a range of interactions on Twitter, drawing me into a network of early career scholars, and by email as I was contacted by other early career scholars interested in sharing their information with me. The main impact of the article was the number of people who made contact afterwards to share their experiences of dabbling in the digital environment to scaffold their nascent research careers. They were grateful that this was being endorsed by my article. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/jan/15/early-career-researchers-career... |
| Description | Presentation at conference (MuseumNext) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The presentation sparked a debate during the question period, and a range of follow-up interactions both at the conference, and afterwards by email. I became involved in a large professional community that I had not engaged with before, and I participated in discussions advising on future funding applications in cultural institutions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.museumnext.com |