Selected Readings

On this page, you will find a list of selected readings that will help you get started with crowdsourcing.
To suggest readings for this page, please contact us!

 

What is Crowdsourcing?

Howe, J. (2006, June). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired, 14.

  • This article coined the term “crowdsourcing”, introducing the concept to many companies and business for the first time. 

Owens, T. (2013) Digital Cultural Heritage and the Crowd. Curator: The Museum Journal, Vol. 56. Iss. 1.

  • This article covers many diverse topics, such as crowdsourcing definitions, challenges and user motivations specifically related to libraries and archives. 

 

Breaking it Down

Dunn, S. & Hedges, M. Crowdsourcing Communities: Crowd-sourcing in the Humanities: A Scoping Study. 

  • These materials break down the idea of crowdsourcing into many smaller, more implementable actions. 

Ooman, J. & Aroyo, L. (2011). Crowdsourcing in the Cultural Heritage Domain: Opportunities and Challenges. Internationales Institut für Sozio-Informatik.

  • This article dissects different crowdsourcing projects into classifications such as co-curation, classification and crowdfunding while also providing an overview of different user motivations for involvement. 

 

Key Projects

Ridge, M. (Ed.). (2014). Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate.

  • (from the Publisher’s description) “This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought-provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves.”

Voss, Jon, Gabriel Wolfenstein and Kerri Young. From crowdsourcing to knowledge communities: Creating meaningful scholarship through digital collaboration. MW2015: Museums and the Web 2015. Published February 1, 2015. Consulted May 12, 2015.

  • Case Study of three pilot projects by Stanford University and Historypin, “testing how humanities researchers might use different types of crowdsourcing or community sourcing to further research, and to ask questions that would be difficult or impossible to answer in more traditional modes of inquiry.”
  • “In this paper, we share the details of the various projects and their outcomes, as well as a host of tools we found helpful in the process of identification, outreach, and collaboration with knowledge communities.”

L. Carletti, D. McAuley, D. Price and G. Giannachi, Digital Humanities and Crowdsourcing: An Exploration. In Museums and the Web 2013, N. Proctor & R. Cherry (eds). Silver Spring, MD: Museums and the Web. Published February 5, 2013.

  • This article introduces the concept of crowdsourcing for digital humanities, as well as providing multiple case studies and examples. 

Vershbow, B. (2013). NYPL Labs- Hacking the Library. Journal Of Library Administration, 53(1), 79-96. doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756701

  • This article details how the New York Public Library’s Labs have made strides in the field of crowdsourcing research and development. 

Ellis, S. (2014). A History of Collaboration, a Future in Crowdsourcing- Positive Impacts of Cooperation on British Librarianship. Libri: International Journal Of Libraries & Information Services, 64(1), 1-10. doi:10.1515/libri-2014-0001

  • This article covers a diverse group of British case studies such as FamilySearch, the British Museum, as well as the Sounds of the UK and Ancient Lives projects. 

Daniels, C., Holtze, T. L., Howard, R. I., & Kuehn, R. (2014). Community as Resource- Crowdsourcing Transcription of Historic Newspapers. Journal Of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 26(1), 36-48. doi:10.1080/1941126X.2014.877332

  • This article covers challenges and opportunities specific to a crowdsourced transcription project.

Spindler, R. (2014). An Evaluation of Crowdsourcing and Participatory Archives Projects for Archival Description and Transcription

[unpublished paper].

  • This article evaluates the participatory archives system at the University of Arizona Libraries. 

 

Crowdsourcing How To’s

Bell D., The Crowdsourcing Handbook: The How to on Crowdsourcing, Complete Expert’s Hints and Tips Guide by the Leading
Experts, Everything You Need to Know About Crowdsourcing [book] Emereo Pty Limited, 2009.

  • This full length book is regarded as a one-stop-shop toolkit for starting and maintaining a crowdsourcing project.

Van Ess H., “Crowdsourcing: how to find a crowd”, ARD/ZDF Academy, Germany, 2010.

  • This online presentation will help point you in the right direction when it comes to finding your key crowdsourcing demographics. 

 

Evaluation

Owens T., Blake T. Reviewed by Pucci D., Huang J., Punjasthitkul S. (2014). Evaluating Crowd Contributions: Quality Assurance & Control for User Contributed Items and Metadata.

  • Conceptualized from the Crowd Consortium’s Boston Meeting in the Fall of 2014, this white paper describes principles for evaluating user contributed items and metadata.

Dion Hoe-Lian, G., Ang, R. P., Chei Sian, L., & Chua, A. K. (2011). Fight or Unite- Investigating Game Genres for Image Tagging. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science & Technology, 62(7), 1311-1324. doi:10.1002/asi.21478

  • This article evaluates the quality of tags that crowdsourcing can yield and suggests ways to bridge the semantic gap. 

Bodreau K. J., Lakhani K. R., “Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner”, Harvard Business Review, 91(4), p. 60-69, 2013.

  • This article presents crowdsourcing as a way to solve several large, common problems in the business world. 

 

Miscellaneous

Harnessing human computation. (2013). Economist, 407(8838), 22-23.

  • This article discusses ways that crowdsourcing and gamification can often co-mingle. 

Crossan M., Apaydin M., A Multi-Dimensional Framework of Organizational Innovation- A Systematic Review of the Literature, Journal of Management Studies, 47(6), p. 1154-1191, 2010.

  • This article is a review of how the traditional organizational structure of organizations can be re-imagined to include crowdsourcing.