As we think about how to use crowdsourcing in humanities research it is useful to look back at the pre-digital projects that used networks of volunteers to assist in research tasks. The development of the Oxford English Dictionary is an early example that comes to mind as it benefited from volunteer support in the time-consuming work of reading works to find early uses of words.
The OED makes a useful example to think about for a number of reasons:
- First of all, looking at pre-digital projects lets us see the importance of how people are managed, motivated, and trained. According to the Wikipedia article, for example, “Furnivall then became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, yet temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips had been misplaced.” It is easy to think that the technology is what makes crowdsourcing, but I suspect that often it distracts us from the ways we chunk the problem (for volunteers), bring them in, motivate them, manage them and recognize them.
- It is an example in the humanities with an outcome that we recognize still as useful and relevant. It was initiated by a scholarly society, the Philological Society, and was actually an important project to switch to digital methods when they worked with the University of Waterloo to develop the SGML-based New OED.
- There is a literature about the human dimensions of the project including The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary which tells the story of a prolific and mad contributor, W. C. Minor. Thus we can learn from the stories told about the human aspects of the project.
Of course, it probably isn’t the “first” such project. What are some other examples? Can we recover a history of the human in the development of humanities resources.