This article employs qualitative research design and methods to examine volunteer motivation and continued experiences of participation in the Smithsonian Institution's Transcription Center (TC), a large-scale crowdsourcing project and space for engagement with collections, Smithsonian Institution staff, and peer volunteers, or volunpeers. Data were obtained from two focus groups conducted on August 24 and 25, 2015. Following these discussions, an experimental method of crowdsourced authorship was developed by the researchers and participants wherein seven volunteers involved in the focus groups became participant researchers who collaborated with the two lead researchers to analyze and interpret the data. This authorship method mirrors the very nature of crowdsourcing by gaining investment and contribution from several volunteers as a means both of collaborating and sharing authority and of distributing labor and yielding a broader perspective in terms of point of view and thus a more diverse result. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to highlight five reasons volunteers participate in the TC and, second, to present an experimental methodology of crowdsourced authorship in conjunction with qualitative research. Participatory projects, such as crowdsourcing among cultural heritage institutions and research conducted through citizen science initiatives, rely on the activity of volunteers, amateurs, and nonexperts to achieve goals of the projects undertaken. These projects, commonly referred to as GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) crowdsourcing, are grounded in the need as well as the desire to engage, gain assistance from, and share with the public. Opportunities for the public to transcribe, review, research, and share information within the space of the Smithsonian Institution's Transcription Center (TC) are constantly emerging. Many hands can certainly make light work, but what brings the hands to the table? And how can we keep them there to continue contributing? This article answers the first question and begins to posit answers to the second. Writing collectively as two lead researchers and seven participant researchers, we detail the reasons volunteers contribute to the TC before turning to reflections on the ways that a flexible space such as the TC can meet many motivations at once. But Why Participate? Motivations in Many Contexts For the TC, participation and motivation appear to be tightly connected. Understanding one may offer insight into the other. Studying motivation can lead to actionable insights for sustaining, improving, and designing better activity and en-O MEGHAN FERRITER, ET AL.
This article seeks to understand the practices that digital volunteers of the Smithsonian's Transcription Center (TC) engage in aside from transcribing. A thematic analysis of the Twitter feed @TranscribeSI demonstrates that volunteers are doing much more than just transcribing; they are additionally engaging in critical archival practices regarding reflexivity and filling in gaps in the historical record. Museums that hope to foster deep engagement among volunteers and to create a sustained community of virtual museumgoers may wish to model their digital initiatives on those of the TC. Doing so will ensure that museums move beyond mere data extraction toward building complex relationships with audiences through online initiatives.
The idea for this special issue came out of a shared investment among the journal editor, Juilee Decker, and the two focus issue editors, Meghan Ferriter and Christine Rosenfeld, in showcasing the Smithsonian Institution's (SI's) Transcription Center (TC) and how to unlock the power of the crowd in the context of cultural heritage institutions. It is with great pleasure that we introduce this special issue entirely dedicated to exploring the TC: outlining the goals of the TC; explaining how to build, manage, and integrate a similar crowdsourced portal into museum and archival operations; and demonstrating how the TC and similar projects can result in deep and sustained engagement among virtual museum visitors, satisfying their quest for lifelong learning. This introduction provides a brief overview of the TC and familiarizes readers with the terms that refer to common practices and units within SI, foreshadows the contributions of each article, and delimits the scope of this collection of articles by pointing to topics not covered. We hope that by the end of reading this special issue, you will have a better sense of the role of crowdsourcing within the context of cultural heritage institutions. The experiences and perspectives shared here are poised to help you feel prepared and excited to engage with said initiatives rather than being overwhelmed by them. In the most basic sense, the TC is a website and Web application. It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week; is open to anyone with Internet access across the world; and (by design) requires minimal technical requirements and support. The TC houses digitized SI records that are in need of transcription and supports the activity of volunteers in transcribing and reviewing these materials for the purposes of improving accessibility and searchability to researchers. Collections including digitized diaries, photo albums with captions, field notes, journals, specimen labels, and lab experiment logs all have a home on the TC. These types of materials are organized into projects and are available for volunteers to transcribe, with new projects released across the system weekly. The TC uses a peer review process. After a document is fully transcribed, it is reviewed by another volunteer and is then passed to SI staff to complete a final review to approve the page.
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