Session Proposal, Talk: What can we do with the crowd?

One thing to consider might be how we can use (and manage) “the crowd” in digital humanities. I’m thinking of this broadly, from collaborations such as “Transcribe Bentham” and text corrections and comments on Trove (for example the anachronism issue), to the management of comments on blogs and collaboration on wikis.

Food for thought before the day might be:

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 117 – 46. www.csupomona.edu/~zywang/Rosenzweig.pdf

Causer, Tim, Justin Tonra, and Valerie Wallace. “Transcription Maximised; Expense Minimised? Crowdsourcing and Editing the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 2 (2012): 119-37. bit.ly/1a9v04F

Waters, Neil L. “Why You Can’t Cite Wikipedia in My Class.” Communications of the ACM 50, no. 9 (September 2007): 15-17. www2.hawaii.edu/~nreed/ics313/lectures/Waters07wikipedia.pdf

Macnamara, Jim. 2013. Google’s Map of North Korea Stirs Social Media Passion and Tensions. < theconversation.edu.au/googles-map-of-north-korea-stirs-social-media-passion-and-tensions-11858 >, 30th January 2013.

Madsen-Brooks, Leslie. “‘I Nevertheless Am a Historian’: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers.” In Writing History in the Digital Age: A Born-Digital, Open-Review Volume, edited by Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty. < writinghistory.trincoll.edu/ >, 2012.

Categories: Session: Talk |

About daveearl

I'm a PhD candidate and tutor in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. My research interests include histories of youth, gender, welfare, education and disability. I have a keen interest in digital history and all things web. My dissertation is titled "Help Us/Help Them: How Australian parents understood the problem of mental retardation, and what they did about it, 1945-1970." I haven't played Galaga for several years, but am now tempted.