CAREER: Transforming Investigative Science and Practice with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing

这项研究将创建一个体现专家主导的众包的创新社会技术基础设施，并以此为试验台，分别在历史、新闻和国家安全领域，围绕有效性、伦理和效率三大主题进行一系列混合方法研究。随着越来越多的信息来源上线，数以千计的业余侦探在网站上合作进行自己的调查。一些众包调查取得了显著的成功，帮助抓获了罪犯并找到了失踪人员。其他善意的努力都以失败或灾难告终，数字义勇军正在崛起。迫切需要从科学、技术和社会计算的角度进行研究，以塑造众包调查的未来，使之成为一股造福社会的力量。这一需要可以通过专家领导的众包来解决，这是一种新的调查方法，利用专家和人群的互补优势来取得比任何一方单独能够取得的更大结果。外联工作将在网上和研讨会上为专业和业余调查人员带来新的工具和技术。教育活动将培训不同的学生群体利用尖端调查技术和大数据来回答紧迫的社会问题。这项研究将通过综合社会计算和众包的概念和技术，在多个领域改变调查科学。对于这三个主题中的每一个，研究都将研究专家调查人员，扩展基础设施对专家与人群互动的支持，并评估基础设施在一系列照片调查任务中的好处。对当前专家调查的严格研究将产生关于当前实践的丰富结论，并提炼设计考虑因素。本研究还将引入专家主导的众包的新方法，以克服单个专家的认知和资源限制，以及对人群的有效性、伦理和效率挑战。新平台将使专家主导的众包背后的想法具体化，并为评价研究提供一个网站，这些研究产生在线协作和协作发现的基础知识和更广泛的原则。

This research will create an innovative sociotechnical infrastructure that embodies expert-led crowdsourcing and use it as a testbed to conduct a series of mixed-methods studies around three major themes: effectiveness, ethics, and efficiency, in the domains of history, journalism, and national security, respectively. As more information sources have come online, thousands of amateur sleuths collaborate on websites to investigate for themselves. Some crowdsourced investigations have yielded remarkable success, helping to catch criminals and locate missing persons. Other well-intentioned efforts have ended in failure or disaster, and digital vigilantism is on the rise. There is an urgent need for research informed by scientific, technical, and social computing perspectives to shape the future of crowdsourced investigations as a force for societal good. This need can be addressed with expert-led crowdsourcing, a novel approach to investigation that leverages the complementary strengths of experts and crowds to achieve greater results than either could alone. The outreach efforts will bring new tools and techniques to professional and amateur investigators online and in workshops. The educational activities will train diverse groups of students to leverage cutting-edge investigative technologies and big data to answer pressing societal questions.This research will transform the science of investigation in multiple domains by synthesizing concepts and techniques from social computing and crowdsourcing that have mostly been overlooked. For each of the three themes, the research will study expert investigators, extend the infrastructure's support for expert-crowd interaction, and evaluate the benefits of the infrastructure on a series of photo investigation tasks. Rigorous studies of current expert investigations will generate rich findings about current practice and distill design considerations. This research will also introduce the novel approach of expert-led crowdsourcing to overcome the cognitive and resource limits of individual experts and the effectiveness, ethics, and efficiency challenges to crowds. The new platform will make concrete the ideas behind expert-led crowdsourcing and provide a site for evaluation studies that generate foundational knowledge and broader principles of online collaboration and collaborative discovery.