A Museum without Walls: Realising the Potential of Crowdsourcing in the Arts

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The purpose of this project is to explore the impact of new information and communications technologies on public interaction with and awareness of publicly-owned works of art in museum collections. The focus of the research project is a case study, YourPaintings Tagger, an important new crowdsourcing initiative in the Arts and Humanities. YourPaintings is a major new digital art collection from the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), comprising digital images of 200,000 publicly-held oil paintings in the UK, 80% of which are currently not on public display. This exciting new resource will be completed in 2012 and mounted on the BBC website, where the collection will be freely available to all. In advance of its public launch, YourPaintings is embarking on a crowdsourcing initiative to create and enhance metadata for the collection. The YourPaintings Tagger will ask the public to provide supporting information for the digital images, from simple descriptive tags to information about sitters, locations and artists. By monitoring the usage and impact of this initiative from the ground up, the project will consider the potential of crowdsourcing techniques in the Arts and Humanities.Crowdsourcing initiatives have become increasingly popular means of generating content and analysis from large data sets. They have many advantages, offering a cost-effective means of adding or engaging with content, bringing researchers into contact with the public in innovative and involving ways, and generating interest in and access to scientific and cultural resources that can be hidden from public view. These initiatives are also politically timely, as they conform to the government's drive towards a 'Big Society', in which 'people power' is harnessed to enhance community resources. Thus far they have primarily been located within the sciences, with successful initiatives such as Galaxy Zoo, e-Bird and Foldit leading the way. These techniques are now spreading to the Arts and Humanities, with manuscript projects such as Transcribe Bentham and Old Weather now in their early stages. YourPaintings Tagger is an innovative attempt to bring crowdsourcing to the Arts via a major publicly owned cultural heritage resource, and to introduce the strategy of asking for community contributed content as an integral part of resource development. In addition to analysing a large data set that will be a crucial addition to the research community, publicly contributed metadata will allow all visitors to the YourPaintings site to search and discover the collection.This project will examine the impact of this crowdsourcing initiative in the Arts and Humanities community, asking whether it succeeds in encouraging the public to contribute quality data, and investigating what impact this data has on the digital resource YourPaintings. It will look at user communities, how users contribute data, what kind of data they contribute, and how this data is viewed by different (expert and non-expert) users. It will look at communities, both of resources and of people, to show how these intersect with one another and how YourPaintings Tagger impacts upon them. The results of the research will be disseminated to the widest possible audience, through traditional academic outputs such as conference and seminar papers, peer-reviewed publications, a project website and workshop, as well as through contacts with policy and third sector organisations facilitated by project partners at the PCF and BBC. Discussion of methods used to conduct the research will be contributed to the JISC-funded Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources together with guides to any new techniques or methods developed during the research project. This free resource can be found at www.microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr.