Engaging crowds: citizen research and heritage data at scale

公众参与遗产研究有可能吸引新的受众，动员公众分析和生成大规模数据，并邀请人们从新的角度看待我们的国家收藏。释放这种潜力的关键是不同受众的有效参与，以及为在藏品发现平台内创建和重新使用数据、培训自动化系统以及让公民和研究人员接触到工作流而开发的工作流程。我们将确定扩大和深化跨社区参与的方法，为未来公民研究项目提供遗产数据的最佳实践框架，为其设计和建模提供参考。公民研究和自动化是捕获和描述我们日益增长的模拟、数字和数字化数据的两种互补方法。我们建议通过开发数据再利用工作流程来阐明它们之间的协同效应，超越项目的初始重点，为当前和未来的学术提供解决新研究问题的潜力。这三个IRO拥有丰富的公民研究经验，分别是爱丁堡皇家植物园(RBGE)、格林威治皇家博物馆(RMG)和国家档案馆(TNA)，以及牛津大学Zooniverse世界领先的公民研究专业知识及其独特的免费、开源基础设施、全球190万志愿者社区，以及交付了190多个众包项目的技术专长。这个项目处于独特的地位，可以通过公民研究来研究和制作工具原型，以便更深入地参与我们的收藏：创造一个增加和更知情的公众参与的良性循环，从而引导社区大规模创建更多的收藏数据。该项目将召集来自不同部门的专业人员来扩大我们的公民研究社区，并确保有效地重新使用来自大众来源的数据。这将通过解决以下问题来实现：1.我们如何最好地让全国社区的志愿者参与公民研究项目，以促进对我们收藏的共同理解？哪些现有的方法和数据是衡量这种参与度最成功的？2.在公民研究项目的数据中导航自己的路径的能力如何影响项目的参与度？3.我们如何验证、评估、呈现和评价公民研究的贡献？4.我们如何能够在收集发现平台内重新使用众包数据，用于培训自动化系统，并向公民和研究人员提供访问权限，以支持和鼓励进一步的参与、重复使用和分析？5.容易地访问公民研究项目创建的数据是否会影响项目的参与度？要实现对这些数据的有意义的访问，还需要哪些其他工具？

Public participation in heritage research has the potential to engage new audiences, to enlist the crowd in analysing and generating data at scale, and to invite new perspectives on our national collections. Key to releasing this potential is effective engagement of diverse audiences, and the development of workflows for the creation and re-use of data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to the citizens and researchers.We will identify ways of extending and deepening engagement across communities, proposing a best-practice framework for future citizen research projects with heritage data, informing their design and modelling. Citizen research and automation are two complementary methods for capturing and describing our increasing quantities of analogue, digital and digitised data. We propose articulating the synergies between them by developing workflows for the re-use of data beyond projects' initial focuses to provide current and future scholarship with the potential to address new research questions.Led by three IROs with significant experience of citizen research, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE), Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) and The National Archives (TNA), and the world-leading citizen research expertise of the University of Oxford's Zooniverse with its distinctive free, open source infrastructure, community of 1.9 million volunteers worldwide, and technical expertise of having delivered over 190 crowdsourcing projects, this project is uniquely placed to research and prototype tools for deeper engagement with our collections through citizen research: to create a virtuous circle of increased and better informed public engagement that leads communities to create more collections data at scale.The project will convene expertise from across sectors to expand our citizen research community and to ensure the effective re-use of crowd-sourced data. This will be achieved by addressing the following questions:1. How can we best engage volunteers across the nation's communities with citizen research projects, to further a shared understanding of our collections? What existing methods and data are the most successful for measuring that engagement?2. How does the ability to navigate one's own path through the data of a citizen research project affect engagement with the project?3. How can we verify, assess, present, and value the contributions of citizen research?4. How can we enable the re-use of crowd-sourced data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to citizens and researchers that supports and encourages further engagement, re-use and analysis?5. Does easy access to data created by citizen research projects affect engagement with projects? What other tools are necessary to enable meaningful access to this data?