Zooniverse & Industrial Photographs

Short summary

The National Collection Social Machine, as conceptualised by the Congruence Engine thus far, will comprise of data-enhancing processes, as well as socially led processes which encourage engagement with collections data through discussion, knowledge sharing, and other forms of participation.

This investigation will be part of the broader ongoing experimentation with the Social Machine localised in Bradford and will experiment with some of the crowdsourcing tools developed by the Communities & Crowds project. More specifically, it will be an experiment in utilising an online platform (Zooniverse) which has a social infrastructure centred around participating in a crowdsourcing project. Volunteers on Zooniverse projects can interact with one another using the Talk Forums, as well as a newly developed feature called “Quick Talk”. This case study will test this new Zooniverse feature to better understand if they can facilitate greater community inclusion in the creation of collections metadata.

This investigation will experiment with the social infrastructure on Zooniverse by creating a crowdsourcing project using photographic collections from Bradford and examining the ways in which participants interact among themselves as well as with the photographs online. In addition, we will also examine how participants utilise the tagging features on Zooniverse and how that impacts the ways in which other people can interact with the images there. Ideally, the results from this experimentation will help inform the development of the social infrastructure of the National Collection Social Machine.

Research questions:

• What can we learn from already existing crowdsourcing infrastructures (e.g., Zooniverse) that can be applied to the development of the social infrastructure for the Social Machine?
• What can we learn about people’s motivations for engaging with heritage research through interactions and conversations on Zooniverse?
• What can we learn from the tagging capabilities of Zooniverse and how they shape further engagement with photographic collections?
• What kind of pipelines are available through Zooniverse to contribute to National Science and Media Museum cataloguing?
• For non-institutional collections, how can Zooniverse help create catalogue descriptions to be added to the Congruence Engine data pool of Bradford-related cultural heritage materials?

People

Alex Fitzpatrick: Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing

Geoff Belknap: Supervision

Tim Smith: Resources

Data sources:

• 78 photographs related to Drummonds Mill from the personal archive of Tim Smith
• 89 photographs of the Baird TV (Radio Rentals) factories in Bradford, held in the National Science and Media Museum collection

Investigation methods/ tools/ code/ software:

• Crowdsourcing techniques (using transcription, image description, and object identification workflows)
• Zooniverse platform- including Zooniverse-built tools: ALICE, Caesar)

Outputs:

• Zooniverse project, Bradford’s Industrial Heritage through Photographs (publicly available on the platform and will be archived on there after completion)
• Crowdsourced data will be aggregated and sent back to collection holders (Tim Smith and National Science and Media Museum)
• Book Chapter

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License - CC BY 4.0.