Working with the public in historical data creation

Abstract

Historians engage with the nonacademic public in diverse ways, from blogging their research, to publicfriendly periodicals, to the art and practice of public historians. Within this special issue we present another way to engage with the broader public, through the shared creation of historical data. The four papers in this special issue arise from a session on historical crowdsourcing at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, in Montreal in 2017. Each paper presents a different approach to using webbased interfaces to co-create historical data with a broad nonacademic audience. Scholars from across the historical sciences can use the lessons learned within this issue to guide development of their own public-facing data creation projects. There are a multitude of approaches to involving the broader public in the research process, and Lafreniere et al. herein presents an extensive overview. However, one fundamental distinction is between true crowdsourcing and “citizen science”. The former means asking the public to contribute historical knowledge, such as Pooley and Turnbull (1998) asking family historians for their ancestors’ migration histories, or seeking personally-held historical documents, such as HistoryPin’s online assembly of geo-located old photographs (www. historypin.org). None of the projects presented here prioritized this approach, though some include elements, instead they broadly follow a citizen science or public participatory model by providing the public with the historical documents to work on. However, none operated under the formal umbrella of the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA; www.citizensciencealliance.org), which developed out of the paradigmatic Galaxy Zoo project. The projects herein all aimed to broaden engagement, involving the public in designing the software, funding the project or simply feeling part of a shared endeavor. GB1900 (Aucott et al.) worked with the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, and 1,200 online volunteers, to transcribe the 2.55 million text strings on the Ordnance Survey’s second edition County Series six inch maps of Great Britain published 1887–1913, a scale showing and naming all major streets. The project’s history and outputs are described elsewhere (Southall et al. 2017; Aucott and Southall 2019), so this paper focuses on the volunteers, presenting detailed analyses of individual “transcribing histories”, an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. This project attempted to also gather personal names for places, but both the interface and publicity emphasized transcription, and results were very limited. The Keweenaw Time Traveler Project (KeTT; Lafreniere et al.) employed a public participatory GIS model that asks “Citizen Historians” to create historical GIS data from Sanborn fire insurance plans, produced between 1880 and 1950. The project included the public in the design of the webapps by utilizing an in-person user-centered design approach (Scarlett et al. 2018). The three distinct KeTT webapps ask users to classify building materials, building use and function, and to transcribe map notations about ownership and other qualitative information about the built environment. The public-created data is automatically linked to researchercreated datasets such as geocoded census and city directories and are immediately available via a fourth webapp. This “Explore App” contextualizes both data types, adds agency and authority to public-created data, while supplementing and enriching the researcher-created data. The DRAW project (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather; Sieber and Slonosky) utilizes a mixed crowdsourcing and citizen science model to transcribe the