We are now continuing to look at available digital tools, and user participation projects are characterized by their large scale and the involvement of a lot of people (volunteers). Wikipedia immediately comes to my mind as a great example of a user participation project. In future versions of the course, I may split this unit into separate units, but for now I'm going to lump together crowdsourcing and user participation projects, although there is a slight difference between the two.
Participation Projects
One of the fascinating new uses of online digital technology has been the phenomenon of crowdsourcing (sometimes also called user participation) projects. Basically, that means tapping into the knowledge and abilities of the "crowd" (all the people out there in the world who are paying attention at any single moment) to solve a problem. This has been facilitated by the quick rise of communication techniques which have made tapping into the crowd's expertise very easy, often through such devices as twitter and Facebook. (Let's not forget that an even more "successful" crowd-sourcing project is Wikipedia, and that doesn't rely on any specific means of communication.)
With regard to Twitter (aka X) and Facebook, I have seen numerous examples of their use (in educational settings) as crowd-sourcing problem solvers. For example, a professor can tweet out a historical problem (say, for example, on opposition to the entry of the US into World War I) and twitter users can communicate with one another until a single answer has been resolved.
There are quite a few different kinds of user-participation projects out there now, and as I come across more, I will add them to this list of examples that I have right now. (Some of these I already have listed on the schedule, and others I have listed on the Historical Transcription assignment page.)
- The Field Expedition Mongolia (aka the cyber hunt for Genghis Khan) is kind-of cool but no longer active, having ended in December 2014. See the article explaining results, Crowdsourcing the Unknown: The Satellite Search for Genghis Khan
- The World Memory Project is an Ancestry.com project dealing with Holocaust records.
- The Genographic Project, students had told me about this, gives you a personal role in an atlas of human history.
- GlobalXplorer uses the power of the crowd to analyze satellite images currently available to archaeologists. (Also, see her Ted talk.)
- the Smithsonian Transcription Center has several different projects right now.
- Reclaim the Records is a different kind of group project.
- I have many more listed on the Historical Transcription assignment page.
- I like the idea of collaborating on transcription projects, for example, the transcription of handwritten census records so that those records can be indexed and then searched by digital means.
My last comment here is really a question, could we consider the field of genealogy as a type of user participation endeavor? Well, I think that the phrasing of the question itself provides a hint at the answer. In particular, I thought of genealogy as digital user participation in the case of the public, one-world family trees that are online in Ancestry.com.