Communities & Crowds: Expanding Volunteer Programs Across Physical and Digital Spaces for Cultural Institutions
Lead Research Organisation:
Science Museum Group
Department Name: National Media Museum Research
Abstract
The 'Communities & Crowds' project offers a new model for Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) institutions to engage more deeply with their audiences through their collections, both in-person and online. The goal of the project is ultimately to break down barriers, and engage new volunteer communities to interrogate and make visible heritage collections in collaboration with institutional structures. By combining participatory and citizen science methodologies throughout this project, the outcomes of this experimental program will have impact for both museum practice and concepts of digital-enabled participation.
In cultural heritage organizations across the UK and US, volunteers are a critical part of institutional infrastructure. Volunteer labor is ubiquitous, spanning disciplines from art museums to planetaria. Within cultural organizations, volunteers interact with visitors, work with collections, and provide administrative support, among myriad other tasks that vary across institutions. Volunteers help to ensure that institutions run smoothly, even when budget limitations prevent the hiring of additional staff. At the same time, volunteers personally benefit from their association with museums, either due to interest in the content of collections, a feeling of 'giving back' to one's community, opportunities for socialization, or career-oriented learning and experience-building.
As cultural institutions increasingly make use of digital technology to engage audiences, the need for volunteers has arisen in those spaces as well. However, digital volunteer opportunities often focus on volunteers as audiences, rather than as an essential part of the institutional team. One example of attracting digital volunteers to heritage institutions is through online crowdsourcing projects. Crowdsourcing is a form of digitally-enabled participation which invites volunteers to engage with institutional collections by performing meaningful tasks. It is often viewed as a way to simultaneously encourage public engagement with heritage materials, while completing essential institutional data processing tasks that can result in making collections searchable and discoverable by a wider range of audiences. However, most crowdsourcing projects are created 'offline' and only shared with online volunteers once the project's aims and research questions are fully formed. In this way, digital volunteers are assigned the role of 'users' or 'audience', rather than as co-creators or collaborators.
In the 'Communities & Crowds' project we aim to re-examine the role of the volunteer in the physical and digital realms, with the ultimate goal of breaking down hierarchical barriers and providing a roadmap for teaching cultural institutions to use online engagement as a model for interacting with both digital and in-person volunteers as collaborators with institutional staff. In particular, we will focus on how this practice can be realized through the process of online crowdsourcing, using the Zooniverse platform as a case study. This collaborative effort will include researchers, curators, educational and volunteer teams at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK), the Zooniverse teams at the Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL) and Oxford University (Oxford, UK), and online volunteers around the world.
In cultural heritage organizations across the UK and US, volunteers are a critical part of institutional infrastructure. Volunteer labor is ubiquitous, spanning disciplines from art museums to planetaria. Within cultural organizations, volunteers interact with visitors, work with collections, and provide administrative support, among myriad other tasks that vary across institutions. Volunteers help to ensure that institutions run smoothly, even when budget limitations prevent the hiring of additional staff. At the same time, volunteers personally benefit from their association with museums, either due to interest in the content of collections, a feeling of 'giving back' to one's community, opportunities for socialization, or career-oriented learning and experience-building.
As cultural institutions increasingly make use of digital technology to engage audiences, the need for volunteers has arisen in those spaces as well. However, digital volunteer opportunities often focus on volunteers as audiences, rather than as an essential part of the institutional team. One example of attracting digital volunteers to heritage institutions is through online crowdsourcing projects. Crowdsourcing is a form of digitally-enabled participation which invites volunteers to engage with institutional collections by performing meaningful tasks. It is often viewed as a way to simultaneously encourage public engagement with heritage materials, while completing essential institutional data processing tasks that can result in making collections searchable and discoverable by a wider range of audiences. However, most crowdsourcing projects are created 'offline' and only shared with online volunteers once the project's aims and research questions are fully formed. In this way, digital volunteers are assigned the role of 'users' or 'audience', rather than as co-creators or collaborators.
In the 'Communities & Crowds' project we aim to re-examine the role of the volunteer in the physical and digital realms, with the ultimate goal of breaking down hierarchical barriers and providing a roadmap for teaching cultural institutions to use online engagement as a model for interacting with both digital and in-person volunteers as collaborators with institutional staff. In particular, we will focus on how this practice can be realized through the process of online crowdsourcing, using the Zooniverse platform as a case study. This collaborative effort will include researchers, curators, educational and volunteer teams at the National Science and Media Museum (Bradford, UK), the Zooniverse teams at the Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL) and Oxford University (Oxford, UK), and online volunteers around the world.
Publications
Belknap G
(2024)
Communities & Crowds: a toolkit for hybrid volunteering with cultural heritage collections
in Science Museum Group Journal
Belknap, G
(2024)
Opening up the Archive: An Approach to Volunteer-led Crowdsourcing in the Museum and Online
in IMPact: E-Journal of Higher Education Research
| Description | This project addresses the theme of fostering digitally-enabled participation, specifically in its aim to provide volunteer communities with a roadmap for becoming involved with projects from their conception, rather than perpetuating a model that keeps design and development in the hands of institutions and away from the communities they serve. We have been able to meet the project goals by undertaking two case case studies of volunteer-led digitisation to crowdsourcing projects at two National museums in the UK. These case studies have led to peer reviewed research outputs, a series of public engagement events targeted at cultural heritage organisations in the UK, newly catalogued collections data, two volunteer created crowdsourcing websites, an open access toolkit, and new Zooniverse technical infrastructure. We have discovered that by creating a process where members of the public can be part of the full life cycle of a collections based project - from conception through design and delivery - the volunteers express a greater sense of connections and agency in working with cultural heritage communities. We have developed a new model (expressed through a toolkit and peer-reviewed publications) for volunteers (both in person and online) to work in collaboration with cultural heritage professionals to find stories in historical collections that matter to them, and which builds confidence in their ability to share that material through online crowdsourcing communities. This work has been enabled by a combination of collaborative and co-creative processes and the implementation of new community focused technical infrastructure on the Zooniverse.org platform. The impact of this research offers a new model for cultural heritage organisations - who are more comfortable with traditional forms of in-person volunteering - to work with volunteers both in-person and online while also increasing the levels of engagement, enjoyment and autonomy for those volunteers. 1. How do we encourage engagement with audiences earlier in the typical process of creating and running online crowdsourcing projects (i.e. while the project is being designed/conceived, rather than post-launch)?; We delivered two volunteer-led crowdsourcing projects at two National museums in the UK, which resulted in two new zooniverse.org projects (How did we get here? and Stereovision). These projects were conceptualised and delivered from cradle to grave by volunteers. At National Science and Media Museum (NSMM) in Bradford - 4 volunteers worked with the Communities and Crowds team between 2021 and 2023 to select and digitise photographic content in the museum's collections that interested them. The volunteers came primarily from the Bradford Afro-Caribbean community and they chose to work on photographic collections related to migration, racism and Caribbean culture. They then created the Zooniverse project - How did we get here? - based on their own research questions. The project both enabled and gave confidence to the volunteers design and deliver an online crowdsourcing project - something they had no previous experience with. The audience feedback research we conducted throughout this first case study indicated that the volunteers felt a greater sense of agency around the stories that were being told through the museum collections and a greater confidence in creating digital tools - such as object scanning and online crowdsourcing. Following this first case study we established a second volunteer-led digitisation to crowdsourcing project at the National Museums Scotland (NMS). Unlike the first case study, the 4 volunteers that worked on the NMS case study were interested in working with the museum to develop skills and to benefit the collections rather than being interested in representing a cohesive community. The volunteers chose to digitise a collection of stereographic images focused on the 1867 international exhibition. Following the same process from the 1st case study, the volunteers developed a new crowdsourcing project - Stereovision - which was led by their own research questions and interests. The outcome of this case study also indicated that the process of including the volunteers at the start of the project created greater engagement and agency with the collections. Combined, the two case studies demonstrate that the toolkit which we have developed for other cultural heritage organisation can be applied to a range of volunteer audiences - from those interested in representing specific community interests to those that are interested in more traditional forms of museum volunteering. The research from these two case studies led to two peer reviewed outputs, and one further submitted for publication. 2. What can traditional museum volunteer practices learn from online crowdsourcing projects, and vice versa?; We have held a major hybrid workshop to share and feed into the the development of a toolkit which involved both cultural heritage workers as well as in person and online volunteers. This was hosted by NMS and the subject specialist network - the Photographic Collections Network. The feedback from this dialog then informed the project toolkit - which is aimed at cultural heritage professionals and online volunteers. The technical infrastructure developed for the project - 'Community Catalog' and 'QuickTalk' - indicate that there is appetite for online volunteers to have mechanisms for adding experiential data to crowdsourcing classifications and for greater dialogue between the project researchers (i.e. in person volunteers) and online volunteers in the creation of this data. Because the in-person volunteers were explicitly not treated as staff - we created no demand for speed and scale in the digitisation process. The consequences of this were smaller than typical datasets for the two volunteer created Zooniverse projects. The result of this was a shorter time span for the online projects (1 week in case study one and 1 month in case study two), and we therefore only have a small dataset of online volunteer engagement, exchange and dialogue between the in-person and online volunteers. However, as the Community Catalog and QuickTalk are now available for any Zooniverse project, we expect to have further data to support future research outcomes relating to this objective. Positive responses to both tools from researchers and Zooniverse volunteers alike have already led to wider adoption of these tools, described in detail below. 3. How can we optimize the Zooniverse 'Talk' discussion forum to encourage/nurture this type of collaboration between research/archival teams and volunteers? We have created two new technical products, the Community Catalog and QuickTalk. The Community Catalog: The Community Catalog (https://community-catalog.zooniverse.org) is a tool that we created to allow Zooniverse participants to engage in the kind of archival exploration that the volunteer researchers at NSMM and NMS experienced when choosing photos for their resulting projects. The Community Catalog is a data exploration app that facilitates sharing/discovery of participants' contributions alongside institutional metadata about the materials in a given project. It includes: a home page with search/browsing capabilities; an individual page for each photograph included in the project, which displays institutional metadata, participant-generated hashtags, and Talk comments; a 'Classify this subject' button allows users exploring the data to go directly to the Zooniverse project and participate in whatever type of data collection is taking place (transcription, labelling, generating descriptive text, etc.). QuickTalk: All Zooniverse projects come with a built-in message board system, known as Talk. The original design of the Zooniverse platform intentionally kept Talk interactions separate from the classification interface; participants could comment directly on a specific subject, but only after completing the classification task. QuickTalk provides a 'mini' Talk area that teams can choose to add on the Classify page of their project, which allows users to read and post Talk comments without leaving the page. These tools help meet our objective of using Talk to nurture collaboration and conversation, by not requiring the 'engagement' component of Zooniverse projects to come after the process of classifying. They allow engagement to take place before, after, and during the classification process by removing the monodirectional requirement from posting on Zooniverse Talk boards. |
| Exploitation Route | The toolkit and results of the project are currently being trialed by cultural heritage institutions in the UK - such as the Arctic Convoy Museum in Scotland. The trials are still ongoing, so impact results are not yet available. The QuickTalk feature is being used on multiple Zooniverse projects, including several projects in the Notes From Nature organisation (which help further biodiversity and natural history research by transcribing museum specimen labels), and the PRINT project (which aims to trace communication networks of early modern Europe and how these networks shaped migration in the Atlantic world through transcribing letters from religious minorities in the 17th and 18th centuries). The Community Catalog is currently being adapted to become a platform-wide update to the Talk boards. After we built it for Communities & Crowds, there was immediate interest from a lot of teams, including STEM researchers. For example, funding to adapt the Community Catalog to create a 'Subject Level Talk Page' for all Zooniverse projects has been provided by NASA. This demonstrates how the success of Communities and Crowds can impact researchers and audiences beyond cultural heritage institutions. |
| Sectors | Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/projects/communities-and-crowds |
| Description | We have delivered just under 1000 newly documents and digitised collections assets for the Science Museum Group and the National Museums Scotland. These have been uploaded to the online collections search websites for each of these museums - making them visible to hundreds of thousand of online visitors every year. We have shared the results of our research with a cultural heritage targeted workshop, and are awaiting the results of relevant institutions adopting the Communities and Crowds toolkit. The research findings have only just been published, so we do not yet have evidence of other cultural heritage organisations adopting our new methodology. We do, however, have early signs of our research influencing academic debate within the history of photography. The project was cited in the Science Museum Group Journal as part of a debate between three senior photographic historians and curators on the necessity of community led research around photographic archive. We anticipate further citation and discussion of our research within the fields of digital humanities and museum studies in the near future. Technical impacts also include an improved user experience and positive feedback from Zooniverse volunteers. For example, one longtime Zooniverse user sent the following message about the QuickTalk feature: "Thank you for this super-useful feature!!!! Comment-during-classify is something I begged to have reinstated ever since NfN migrated from Ouroboros to Panoptes in 2016, and I am very happy that it has returned. Many times daily, I want to submit a comment about my classification that includes values I have entered on the classify screen, and being able to create a Subject Notes comment as I classify allows me to do that easily, without having to temporarily save my entries outside of the browser." |
| First Year Of Impact | 2024 |
| Sector | Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | New streamlined workflow for volunteer-led digitization of archival photographs |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or Improved professional practice |
| Description | Replication of Communites and Crowds Project at Arctic Convoy Museum |
| Geographic Reach | Local/Municipal/Regional |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Title | Daily Herald Photographic Archive - African-Caribbean Heritage |
| Description | Set of data pertaining to the IP rights, condition, type and content of over 200 photographs selected from the Daily Herald Archive with relevance to African-Caribbean heritage. This data will be linked to the digitized images and fleshed out through a research project on the online citizen science platform, Zooniverse. Following this process it will be made available to others via SMG's One Collection online pages. |
| Type Of Material | Data handling & control |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | Increased engagement with the collections: Volunteer researchers have engaged with the material through the inventorying process and gained new knowledge and skills. The expected impact will be to make these important images and their accompanying captions publicly available and visible to a wider audience. |
| Title | Howarth Loomes Stereophotography catalogue enteries |
| Description | Volunteers as part of the Communities and Crowds project working at the National Museums Scotland catalogued 924 stereophotoraphic images into the museums collections management system. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | The images were used to create a crowdourcing project - sterevision - on the Zooniverse.org project. The project engaged 850 online volunteers creating 18406 classifications of these images. These classifications are in the process of being reingested into the NMS catalogue dataset |
| URL | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/juliehgibb/stereovision |
| Description | Communities and Crowds and Congruence Engine (TANC Project) Collaboration |
| Organisation | Science Museum Group |
| Department | The Science Museum |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | UKRI-funded project and part of the broader Towards a National Collection programme. The main aim of the project is to develop a new toolkit of digital tools to link industrial collections nationwide and support curators, researchers, and members of the public in generating new narratives of the past using collections-linking software, machine learning, and other AI and computational techniques. Congruence Engine is drawing from the learnings of Communities & Crowds while developing its own Zooniverse project in order to explore how crowdsourcing projects enable community involvement in heritage documentation. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Congruence Engine is further exploring how to utilise the Zooniverse.org Community Catalogue tool which has been developed bu the Communities & Crowds project. By further testing the newly developed toolkit, we the Communities & Crowds project will be able to have a further case study to ground the research finding of the project. |
| Impact | The research outcome this collaboration is delivering on, is developing new tools on the Zooniverse platform to create space for online community volunteers to engage in participatory work through heritage collections. The collaboration is multi-disiplinary in that it involves historical research, digital humanities and museum studies. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | MA Project in Volunteer Led Design |
| Organisation | Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) |
| Country | Netherlands |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | As part of the second second Communities and Crowds project case study at the National Museums Scotland, we participated with two MA students in design at the University of Delft and the Future Libraries Lab. We have contributed both time of the project team and volunteers to feeding in to the MA design projects |
| Collaborator Contribution | The MA students work focus on two case studies on developing volunteer led design. The outcomes of these projects will hopefully be incorporated into the digital outputs - particularly the second Zooniverse case study project based on National Museums Scotland Collections. |
| Impact | This will result in two MA Case studies in participatory design |
| Start Year | 2024 |
| Title | Community Catalogue |
| Description | The Community Catalogue is an open source web application used in conjunction with Zooniverse crowdsourcing projects. It allows users to explore Zooniverse datasets based on a combination of institutional metadata and Zooniverse volunteer-generated metadata produced through the Talk board (including the QuickTalk feature also produced through this grant). As of March 2023, the Community Catalogue is in the development phase, and will undergo additional rounds of testing and revision before launching fully. |
| Type Of Technology | New/Improved Technique/Technology |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Open Source License? | Yes |
| Impact | n/a (yet) |
| URL | https://github.com/zooniverse |
| Title | Zooniverse QuickTalk feature |
| Description | The QuickTalk feature is an experimental technology which incorporates 'Talk' message board posts into the classification user interface for Zooniverse online crowdsourcing projects. When this feature is enabled, volunteers can view and post messages on a subject-specific Talk thread while classifying on that particular subject. QuickTalk is currently behind a feature flag on a project's Admin page, meaning a Zooniverse administrator has to turn it on for any given project. |
| Type Of Technology | New/Improved Technique/Technology |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | Before this feature was built, volunteers were not able to post on subject-specific boards until after they had classified on a subject (via the "Done & Talk" button in the classification interface). This feature allows volunteers to add 'Notes' to a given subject, for example adding relevant information about a subject or justification for transcribing difficult words in a certain way, etc. As of March 2023, QuickTalk has been tested on a live project, and slight edits were made to the tech based on feedback from project volunteers/testers. The feedback gathered during this experiment will be used as part of the published research output of this grant. QuickTalk is also being incorporated into the "Community Catalogue" -- another technical output of this grant. As of March 2024, two additional Zooniverse projects have used the QuickTalk feature: the Davy Notebooks Project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project) and the Knitting Leaflet Project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/elliereed185/knitting-leaflet-project). Volunteer communities in both projects responded positively to the addition of this new feature. |
| URL | https://github.com/zooniverse |
| Description | "Bussing Out" Visit with Volunteers |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The project volunteers were able to visit "Bussing Out", an art installation at the University of Bradford based on the bussing out scheme involving South Asian, West Indian, and African migrant children during the 1960's and 1970's in the UK. Volunteers were also given the opportunity to engage with the installation artist, Shabina Aslam, who had also previously worked with the Daily Herald Archive. The visit provided the volunteers with further inspiration for their work on the Communities & Crowds project, particularly for determining their goals and research questions for the next phase on Zooniverse. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | A New Approach to Volunteer-Led Digitization and Crowdsourcing |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Online session as part of the National Museums Scotland Colonial Histories and Legacies staff working group to share the participatory research approach of the Communities and Crowds Project |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Althea McNish Exhibition Visit with Volunteers |
| 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 | The project volunteers were able to visit the Whitworth Art Gallery and get a guided private tour of the recent Althea McNish exhibition, "Colour is Mine". This visit provide volunteers with the opportunity to further explore the African-Caribbean history of Britain, and inspired discussions regarding the wider impact of the Communities & Crowds project, including potential activities and events involving the local community. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Artefacts Conference - Benefits & Challenges of Crowdsourcing Collections Data Online |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presented the findings from the Communities & Crowds project and spoke about what was learned with regards to developing digital crowdsourcing projects for photographic collections in the future. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-10/ARTEFACTS-Conference-Programme.pdf |
| Description | Audience Development Focus Groups |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Two focus groups have been held with the project volunteers and led by audience researchers from the Science Museum Group in 2021 and 2023. These sessions have been useful in providing further insight into the motivations behind the volunteers' participation in the project and their experiences so far. Information gained from these sessions have been incorporated in future planning for the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2023 |
| Description | Black History Month Event - AFRICAN CARIBBEAN HISTORY IN THE DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Volunteers from the project led on the organisation of an event for Black History Month at the National Science and Media Museum. They curated a selection of materials related to African Caribbean history that they had previously digitised from the Daily Herald Archive as part of their participation in the Communities & Crowds project. These archival materials were displayed for visitors, who were able to not only engage with them, but also with the volunteers. Feedback from the event was positive from both volunteers and guests, with some interest from the latter in participating as a digital volunteer on the upcoming Zooniverse platform. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/what-was-on/african-caribbean-history-daily-herald-archive |
| Description | Blog post: Introducing the Community Catalog |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Wrote a post on the Zooniverse platform blog introducing and explaining the Community Catalog |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://blog.zooniverse.org/2024/08/14/introducing-the-community-catalog/ |
| Description | Bradford African-Caribbean Heritage Network |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | As part of our plan to recruit volunteers and to engage local communities we worked with Bradford Museums & Galleries to set up a working group or network for anyone involved or interested in heritage projects connected to the African-Caribbean community in Bradford. We have had four meetings so far and have established the terms of reference for the network. There are several interconnected projects happening in Bradford at the moment focused on capturing and preserving the stories and heritage of local African-Caribbean people. This network has been established to make sure the different projects can support and learn from each other. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| Description | Communities & Crowds: A New Approach to Volunteer-Led Digitization and Crowdsourcing |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A talk to the National Museums Scotland internal staff presentation series on the progress of the Communities and Crowds project |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Communities and Crowds: opening up collections through hybrid volunteering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | National Museums Scotland delivered an online workshop - targeted at cultural heritage organisations in Scotland (but including the rest of the UK) - who are interested in working with local volunteers to uncover new stories in photographic collections. The workshop asked: how can members of your local community work together with online volunteers from across the world to research and digitise museum collections? Throughout the workshop - the Communities and Crowds team showcased examples of volunteer led crowdsourcing projects created by the project and shared the in-draft toolkit (see publications) for other cultural heritage organisation to adopt and adapt to their own collections. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | FROM THE ARCHIVES TO THE INTERNET: UPDATES FROM THE COMMUNITIES & CROWDS PROJECT - BLOG POST |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The blog post was written by Dr Alexandra Fitzpatrick (Co-I) to update the general public on recent work undertaken as part of the Communities and Crowds project, including recent engagement events and digitisation sessions. It was also used to promote the next phase of the project (the launch of the Zooniverse platform) and signposted readers on where to look for future updates on how to participate as a digital volunteer. Since publication, I have received some messages requesting further information regarding this upcoming project phase. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/communities-crowds-project-update/ |
| Description | How Did We Get Here? Transitioning the Communities & Crowds Project to Zooniverse |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A joint panel at the British Society for this History of Science with the AHRC funded research project - Tools of Knowledge - on the role of crowdsourcing in historical research |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | How Did We Get Here? Volunteer Led Zoonivere Project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This was a primary project outcome of the Communities & Crowds project. The volunteer led Zooniverse platform was created by the volunteers at the National Science and Media Museum in collaboration with the project team, and asked questions of the global online volunteers on Zooniverse.org to contribute to three research tasks related to images the volunteers digitised: decribing whether an image had editorial mark up on it; adding keyword metadata; and transcribing the captions on the back of the image. The project was incredibly successful, and the classifications of over 400 images was completed in a week. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/communitiesandcrowds/how-did-we-get-here |
| Description | Introductory Sessions - Communities and Crowds |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We ran two introductory sessions for members of local communities who had expressed an interest in participating in the Communities and Crowds project. This included an into to the project, an intro to volunteering with SMG (led by Gin Jacobucci - Volunteer coordinator) an introduction and tour of the Insight Archive and the Daily Herald Newspaper Photography Archive. It also included an introduction to Zooniverse from Co-I Samantha Blickhan. All of the participants found the sessions interesting and informative. As a result four people signed up to volunteer on the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Invited lecture for design students in Bangalore |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Samantha Blickhan was invited to give a lecture to design students at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. The course instructor specifically requested that information about Communities & Crowds be included in the talk, as the idea of giving the agency to the volunteers to frame and design the questions they want to investigate was something they were discussing in the course and the instructor felt they would benefit from hearing more about this specific project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | OPENING UP THE DAILY HERALD ARCHIVE TO CITIZEN-LED RESEARCH - BLOG POST |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The blog post was written by Dr Lynn Wray (Co-I) to explain the aims and purpose of the project and to act as an open call to participate. It was used to engage and signpost local groups to during a point of the pandemic where it was difficult to meet with groups face-to-face. We received requests for further information following the blog post and I had several follow up phone conversations and meetings with groups and members of the public that were interested in participating. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/opening-up-the-daily-herald-archive-to-citizen-led-researc... |
| Description | Presentation 'A New Approach to Volunteer Led Digitization' at the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography Conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | As part of the Association of Historical and Fine Art Photography Conference, which is a professional conference for photographers and GLAM professionals who work with historical collections in the UK. We shared our new approach to volunteer led digitization, and shared the potential impact this might have for heritage professionals. The audience for this talk reflected a broad group of museum professionals working across the UK at National, regional and local museums - as well as commercial professionals who sell photographic equipment. Approximately 100 people were in attendance. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/86b648b2-f5ad-45d1-99b5-38af3df6ddb0/2022%20Conference%20-%20Progra... |
| Description | Presentation at HeritageDot Conference - Opening up the Archive: An Approach to Volunteer-led Citizen Science in the Museum and Online |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | As part of the HeritageDot Conference organised by the University of Lincoln, the project PI (Dr Geoff Belknap) and Co-I (Dr Alexandra Fitzpatrick) gave an online presentation on the Communities & Crowds project. Our progress to-date was summarised, with presentations of current digitisation work from our volunteers and early builds from platform development on Zooniverse. We were able to receive feedback from the audience and answered questions regarding the project and its potential application in other contexts. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://heritagedot.org/ |
| Description | Presentation at University of Bradford 'Unify' conference - "Making Museum Collections available online" |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | As part of the University of Bradford 'Unify' conference, the project PI (Geoff Belknap) gave and online presentation entitled "Making Museum Collections available online". The presentation gave an overview of the Communities and Crowds project, and discussed how volunteers were leading the way in digitizing new part of the photographic collections at the National Science and Media Museum. The talk created interest from other academics and museum professionals, who asked how this method could be applied at their institutions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.bradford.ac.uk/events/public/making-museum-collections-accessible-online.php |
| Description | Presentation for DH at Oxford Summer School 'Crowdsourced Research in the Humanities' strand |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Co-PI Belknap and RA Wray gave a talk to participants in the 2022 'Crowdsourced Research in the Humanities' strand of the DH at Oxford Summer School, held at Keble College in July, which was convened by Co-PI Blickhan. Workshop participants learned about the Communities & Crowds project and the work done to date, and had a lively discussion afterward. They were particularly interested to hear more about how the C&C team worked with underrepresented and/or marginalized communities on co-creating crowdsourcing projects, and learn how their institutions could do this work in an ethical, equitable way. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Presentation of 'Challenges of a Photographic Curator' to an online seminar of the Derbyshire Archeological Society/WW Winters |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Geoff Belknap offered a 'behind the scenes' evidence of the challenges and considerations that have to be borne in mind when caring for a national collection. Describing some of the challenges faced with dealing with large photographic collections, based on his experience working with collections at the Science Museum Group and National Museums Scotland, he then offered a solution to engaging with a wider audience through photographic collection. Based on the findings of the Communities and Crowds project, the talk shared some of the initial findings on how to support volunteer led digitization to photographic collections. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.derbyshireas.org.uk/event/challenges-of-a-photographic-curator/ |
| Description | Seminar at University of York |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Seminar talk to students in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, sharing learnings from the Communities & Crowds project and illustrating how students could utilise crowdsourcing for public participation in museums and heritage institutions. Followed by questions and discussion with students. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Unlocking Virtual Volunteering Hybrid Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | The Communities & Crowds project brought together the project team, volunteers, academics, post graduate students and museum professions in the UK and USA for a Hybrid workshop held at National Museums Scotland and on Zoom to explore the outcomes of the project. The workshop shared key finding from the project team on how to engage volunteers online and in person with the digitisation of photographic collections - and created a space for key mid way feedback on the the tools being developed by the project from both researchers in the areas of digital humanities; museum professionals working in a range of heritage professionals; and heritage volunteers. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Unlocking the Future of Virtual Volunteering |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Third sector organisations |
| Results and Impact | A talk describing the Communities & Crowds approach to volunteer led digitization and crowdsourcing to the staff at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago USA. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Volunteer Meet Up |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | Volunteers from the project met up for an informal workshopping session to discuss the next steps for their participation, including the next iteration of the project being developed at the National Museum of Scotland. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Volunteer Sessions with collections volunteers at National Museums Scotland, for case study 2 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | Between August 2023 and March 2024 we have held weekly volunteering sessions with 2-4 volunteers to digitise Stereoscopic collections at the National Museums Scotland. In the next phase of work, these volunteers will be building their own Zooniverse.org project out of the data they have created. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023,2024 |
| Description | Weekly Volunteer Digitization Sessions |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Since October 2021 we have run a recurring weekly session with a group of 4 volunteers. These volunteers were recruited after responding to an open call out which came to be shared with local groups and networks connected to the African-Caribbean community in Bradford. During the sessions volunteers select material from the Daily Herald Archive that they think is important to digitize, they inventory the photographs using app sheet, scan and process the photographs to correct for colour and contrast and rehouse them to archival standard. During the sessions we discuss what is of interest about the photographs, what knowledge the group bring to them from their lived experience and what more we would like to know about them, with a view to developing a citizen science project on the online platform Zooniverse. We have discussions about problematic language and sensitive images. Working together through the material and handling the objects sparks many conversations about lived experience of migration and of racism and the impact of policies impacting particularly on black people, of life in the Caribbean under colonial rule and post-colonialism, and the impact of media representation of African-Caribbean lives and heritage. The digitized photographs will be used to produce a Zooniverse project and the experience of working with the photographs and discussing them with the group will feed into the development of the research question that the Zooniverse project is framed around. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021,2022 |
| Description | Weekly Volunteer Sessions |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Sessions with the volunteer group have continued throughout 2022 and 2023. Although most sessions have been focused on continuing the digitization work that started in October 2021, there have also been sessions focused on developing the project platform that will be launched on Zooniverse. This has included workshopping sessions, "paper prototype" sessions, and general brainstorming sessions during which the volunteers have been able to propose and try out different tasks and activities that will be undertaken by digital volunteers. Through these sessions, we have been able to not only determine the most appropriate tasks for the project, but also identify the main goals and research questions that the volunteers want to focus on during this phase of the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022,2023 |
| Description | Windrush Carnival of Culture |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Volunteers from the project ran a stall with other staff members from the National Science and Media Museum as part of the City of Bradford's Windrush Carnival of Culture on the 16th June 2023. This included a small display of some of the photographs curated by the volunteers for the project. Volunteers were able to further discuss the significance of these photographs to visitors to the stall, which led to many people asking for more information regarding the project overall and how they could get involved with it. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Zooniverse Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A workshop was organised by PIs (Dr Geoff Belknap and Dr Sam Blickhan) and Co-I (Dr Alex Fitzpatrick) to further develop the project platform for Zooniverse with the volunteers and placement postgraduate student in attendance. The goals for this workshop included confirmation of volunteer research questions, identification of roles for the volunteers in the development and administration of Zooniverse, and exploring desired outcomes for the end of the project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |