Crowdsourcing: Citizen History and Criminal Characters
- Publisher:
- De Gruyter
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Making Histories, 2020, pp. 199-210
- Issue Date:
- 2020-09-23
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| Making_Histories_----_(Chapter_16._Crowdsourcing_Citizen_History_and_Criminal_Characters).pdf | Published version | 100.88 kB |
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Since the 1990s digital and social media have emerged as new platforms by which public historians can fulfil their commitment “to make the study of the past accessible to members of the general public” (Leon 2017, 45). However, the Internet did something more than provide a new environment for the production of public histories. The proliferation of blogs, wikis, online exhibitions, digitised record collections, genealogy sites and other venues for exploring the past has radically transformed the meanings of accessibility, as well as the scope of the publics that producers of histories might seek to engage. Digital media means that the production and consumption of history now takes place within a global knowledge economy that thrives on open access. Faye Sayer suggests that digital history has shifted public historians “from a position of safeguarding the ‘authoritative’ and official versions of the past to engagement in the public sourcing of stories and interaction with public production and research” (Sayer, 2015, 223). Similarly, perspectives have changed among members of the public themselves. Sharon M. Leon observes that: “The publics who engage with digital public history are more than passive audience members absorbing content expertise from historians” (Leon 2017, 58).
The digital humanities are thus revolutionising the ways that history is transmitted to, received by, and – perhaps most importantly – performed with public communities. This chapter explores the latter phenomena in particular, by examining crowdsourcing, a practice that directly engages members of public to perform aspects of historical research. This is also sometimes referred to as citizen science or, in the case of historical research, citizen history, terminology that perhaps more clearly speaks to public history’s aim to empower citizens or public by democratising historical knowledge. Here, I tease out the distinctions between these terms, by first offering an overview of what crowdsourcing involves, then
discussing the aspirations that underpin citizen history – to develop wider historical literacy via public engagement in the research process. Finally, the crowdsourcing project Criminal Characters is used as a case study for some of the ways that such citizen history might be achieved.
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