Bridging Citizen Science and Open Educational Resource

Abstract

The ongoing digitization of humanities' archival information has contributed to make highly valuable and highly distributed corpora available for research. Connecting this distributed knowledge and enriching it with more data following a specific research question is a big challenge in digital humanities. The project Interlinking Pictura (IP) addresses this challenge by bridging Citizen Science with Open Educational Resources (OER). In order to achieve this objective, citizens are involved in a broad range of participatory levels of research. Besides the involvement of lay researchers (retired teachers, citizen associations etc.), IP adjusts the tasks to open educational resources for distributing and for an easy integration into learning environments. The IP project is built on semantic wiki platform and involves open linked data to enrich the corpus. This offers the possibility to realize the interoperability at multiple levels using standardized vocabularies. In IP the object of interest is the multilingual "Bilderbuch für Kinder" (illustrated book for children) by F. J. Bertuch (1790-1830), which is one of the earliest encyclopedias for children and a milestone in the development of educational resources. An open edition has been created using Semantic MediaWiki as a collaborative platform to facilitate citizens' contribution. The main goal of IP is the creation of an interlinked corpus about Bertuch's illustrated book through connecting the distributed knowledge about its creation, reception, and usage in pedagogical practices.