‘What’s on the Menu’ is a great example of crowdsourcing. Their website states that The New York Public Library has one of the world's most extensive collections of restaurant menus. ‘Historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts’ use the collection for their specific research (‘About.’ What’s on the Menu?). However, to be truly accessible, The New York Public Library is aiming to transcribe all of the scans of the menus. This will make specific information surrounding meal organisations, specific dishes and their prices more searchable. This will let the ‘historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts’ do their research much more quickly. In their own words: transcribing the collection will ‘dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries’ (‘About.’ What’s on the Menu?). The New York Public Library has created this website that lets anyone with internet access transcribe the menus. It is easy to use and accessible.
I think this is an important aspect of crowdsourcing, which ties into what someone else like amal or someone did near the beginning of the year: accessibility. A crowdsourcing project will not be successful if the everyday person cannot navigate the technology. When we call upon everyday people to contribute we have to make sure they are able to do so.
Something I think is important to point out about The New York Public Library’s crowdsourcing project is the money behind it. The New York Public Library is a big and most likely a wealthy institution. The money needed to start up a crowdsourcing project, with the extra cost of making it accessible, might not be available to everyone wanting to utilise crowdsourcing. This shows a shortcoming of crowdsourcing: while it may save money in the long run, it requires a lot of money upfront to begin it and there is a financial risk that the public will not engage and the project will not get any return.
Trevor Owens’ ‘Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organisations’ discusses how crowdsourcing, a technique developed in the business sector, can be made ethical so it works in the heritage sector. Owens identifies four key aspects of ethical crowdsourcing: Human computation; the wisdom of crowds; tools and software as scaffolding; and understanding participant motivation. I believe that ‘democratising history’ is also a key aspect of ethical, history-based crowdsourcing. Or at least, a historian should aim to democratise history to some level through their crowdsourcing project. This raises questions about the role of historians and academia in history-creation. It also highlights the idea that everyone’s history is legitimate, something that reminded me of oral histories and historiography. Within our context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the potential of crowdsourcing to decolonise dominant historical narratives is also worth thinking about. These aspects of ethical crowdsourcing can be used as a framework by which to analyse various examples of crowdsourcing.
A question we discussed a lot in the seminar was: What role do the individuals participating in the crowdsourcing (the crowd, or amateurs) play in creating this history? Do we think of them as primary sources or as historians? Is the historian's role just to draw conclusions from what the crowd has written? Is drawing conclusions and forming arguments not always the historian’s role?