Crowd-Sourcing Scoping Study

Enthusiasts, connoisseurs and interested amateurs can and do offer much knowledge to the arts and humanities, but we understand little about the communities they form and come from. This review will focus on crowd-sourcing, an existing technique for gathering information from large, distributed user groups, which is ripe to be expanded and developed to meet humanities research needs. What they can these communities offer, what relationships do they form with the academy, and how do aspects of community motivate them to contribute their knowledge. The review will be inquisitive - looking at the nature of those communities - and proactive, working with Connected Communities programme to identify the most productive ways for the AHRC to engage with them. At the heart of this is crowd-sourcing. First coined in 2006, the term itself is not unproblematic: crowd-sourcing has been described as a business model in which a company's consumer group participates in product or service design, and as the harvesting of large amounts of user generated content from social media sites (see Huberman et. al. 2010, 'Crowd-sourcing, attention and productivity', JIS 2009, vol 36:6, 758-765). The questions it provokes for the arts and humanities are numerous: how do communities form around a shared interest in an academic subject, what is the role played by a shared capacity to contribute knowledge to it; what benefits accrue from this process and to whom; which parts of the AHRC's domain stand to gain most by engaging with such 'contributing communities'; how and why such these come to exist, and how they can be identified and reached by the Connected Communities programme; and - not least - what are the main technical challenges facing humanists and arts researchers who wish to draw on the expertise of geographically distributed communities. In recent years the HE sector has responded to these questions obliquely, by adopting crowd-sourcing models. However, few if any of these questions have been addressed systematically (until now). Most academic research projects using crowd-sourcing have largely maintained the approach implied by the word 'crowd', and have been oriented towards the volume of participation, and the advancement of knowledge that a large community of volunteers can make only by virtue of its numbers (examples include GalaxyZoo and Distributed Proofreaders). This review seeks to be the beginning of a process of exploration in to how crowd-sourcing models can be adapted, re-purposed and reformed in order to become useful vehicles for the creation of academic knowledge in the arts and humanities.

The review incorporates a number of information-gathering strands: desk research in to the literature produced by crowd-sourcing projects in the science and social sciences, and focusing in greater depth on those early adopters in the humanities and arts; a survey of contributors to crowd-sourcing projects exploring why they contribute data and what they get out of it; and in-depth interviews with a selected sample of these. This will be complemented by on-line and face to face networking activities in the form of two workshops and an interactive website.

The outcomes will be an overview of crowd-sourcing's current application in the arts and humanities, the background of that application in the sciences and social sciences; an assessment of where, in the arts and humanities, the most fruitful possibilities lie for these applications in the future, and a typology of crowd-sourcing methods which will offer the Connected Communities programme a framework for its future thinking in this area.

Crowd-sourcing is an emerging methodology in academic research, but yet by its very nature it closely bound up with the academic impact agenda. In order to work, any academic crowd-sourcing project *must* have an accessible public interface, an effective communications strategy, and some formal relationship with its community of contributors. By gathering and articulating the experiences of academics who have done this, or who are motivated to want to do it, we will addressing a fundamental issue of how best researchers in universities can engage non-expert or semi-expert communities outside universities. This will feed directly into the AHRC's thinking via our engagement with the Connected Communities programme. The main categories of stakeholders who will benefit from this review are as follows:

Funding bodies: The Connected Communities programme provides an unparalleled opportunity for the AHRC to engage with, and lead, the crowd-sourcing agenda as it applies to the arts and humanities. This is necessary for the AHRC's own aims. In the past ten years the AHRC has funded numerous digital resource creation activities via programmes specifically focused on digitisation, and in the course of research activities, and these represent a significant investment on the part of the funding bodies. Many academics involved in these resources' creation are looking for new ways to develop and refine their digital collections. Moreover, digital research in these areas, it has been noted, frequently conforms to the 'long tail' model. A resource may have niche or limited interest in the short-term, but over the longer term larger and more diverse communities may access and use the information. The review will investigate methods for revitalising interest in existing digital resources via crowd-sourcing models, and how those models can help enhance and sustain humanities digital resources. The project outputs will contribute to a developing body of work being produced by funding bodies on methods for promoting the use of digital resources over time.

Social and economic benefits: It is frequently observed within both the government and business communities that the "digital economy" and the "knowledge economy" are key foundations of the UK's continued prosperity, and that digital inclusivity is crucial if this prosperity is to benefit society as a whole. Indeed, the recent Digital Britain report highlights the need to maximise the social and economic benefits from digital technologies. This review will enable a symbiosis to be developed between academic knowledge, economic benefit and communal and personal interest.
Development of international cultural and economic ties: Given that crowd-sourcing is fundamentally an internet based phenomenon, to follows that its application can, potentially, cross national boundaries. Formalizing crowd-sourcing methods for the humanities and arts, will, potentially, make it easier for scholars to build community-facing projects across different cultural and linguistic zones. It is also likely that the review's outcomes will have much to contribute to future partnerships that the AHRC might wish to build with overseas funding bodies.

Students, educators and the broader public: The methodology and technological approach addressed by the review will by its very nature support engagement with the public and facilitate collaboration between the public and researchers. It will highlight the fact that crowd-sourcing is scalable. The most well-known current applications are limited, in the main, to large and sophisticated projects, which require significant start-up funding, overheads and expertise. Pinning down and categorizing the methods in question, as this review proposes, will bring engagement with crowd-sourcing communities within reach of small projects with specific aims, PhD projects, and even undergraduate teaching programmes.