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

这项研究将创建一个创新的社会技术基础设施，体现专家主导的众包，并将其作为一个试验平台，围绕三个主要主题进行一系列混合方法研究：有效性，道德和效率，分别在历史，新闻和国家安全领域。 随着越来越多的信息来源出现在网上，成千上万的业余侦探在网站上合作，为自己调查。一些众包调查取得了显著的成功，有助于抓获罪犯和找到失踪人员。其他善意的努力都以失败或灾难告终，数字治安维持主义正在上升。迫切需要科学，技术和社会计算视角的研究，以塑造众包调查的未来，作为社会公益的力量。 这一需求可以通过专家主导的众包来解决，这是一种新颖的调查方法，利用专家和群体的互补优势来实现比任何一方都更大的结果。外联工作将在网上和讲习班上为专业和业余调查人员带来新的工具和技术。 教育活动将培养不同群体的学生利用尖端的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来改变多个领域的调查科学，这些概念和技术大多被忽视。对于这三个主题中的每一个，研究将研究专家调查员，扩展基础设施对专家-人群互动的支持，并评估基础设施对一系列照片调查任务的好处。 对当前专家调查的严格研究将产生关于当前实践的丰富发现，并提取设计考虑。本研究亦将介绍专家主导众包的新方法，以克服个别专家的认知和资源限制，以及对群体的有效性、道德和效率的挑战。新平台将具体体现专家主导的众包背后的想法，并提供一个评价研究网站，以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.