Finding a cultural heritage organization running a crowdsourcing campaign for citizen science contributions was a time-consuming process. It was hard finding an organization that was both interesting and fit the parameters of the type of institution and project I was looking for. Eventually, I found Sing Sing Prison Museum’s project “Shadows on Stone: Identifying Sing Sing’s Incarcerated on the website Zooniverse.
I found this collection to be incredibly interesting, and the transcription efforts allow volunteers a humanizing look at the records of incarcerated people of Sing Sing prison. As Ferriter (2016) writes, “every collection item has a story to tell” (p. 102), and that rings even truer with this project. The Sing Sing Prison Museum’s About page for this project mentions “the Department of Prisons began to gather these ledgers and they eventually made their way to the New York State Archives where they were digitized by Ancestry.com a decade ago” (“Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers,” 2023), making it clear that their main audience for this project is those tracing genealogies or at least those interested in the subject. There is not much on their website or Zooniverse page to garner engagement, though there is an app meant to work in congruence with the project that shows the reality of those incarcerated in the prison. In fact, their X (formerly Twitter) account has only one post on it, announcing a break from the site. The Facebook page has a post on October 9 announcing the project, though there is no other mention of the project before or after that one post. Altogether, the participation solicitation from this organization for the Shadows on Stone project has been all but nonexistent.
The Sing Sing Prison Museum has a website that discusses this project and more, offering the details of life in prison for the many different people who were incarcerated there. The site mentions the transcription project, but also offers many valuable resources for understanding the culture of prisons in the mid-1800s to early 1900s. By offering these spotlights on other aspects of prison life, Sing Sing is trying to get visitors to their website interested in getting more involved with their projects. Owens (2013) makes it clear that with projects like this, “we should not treat [potential contributors] as a crowd, and we should not attempt to source labor from them” (p. 122), and Sing Sing is trying to hold true to that ideal. Contributing to this project is treated as a chance to collaborate with others while learning about the intricacies involved in situations leading to incarceration for the people in the records.
The instructions for this transcription process were clear—if information was unclear or missing, transcribers are told to leave those sections blank. There were many instances where I had to try my best to read the record-keeper’s handwriting, which while pretty was very hard to read due to the very stylized cursive font each entry was written in. After finishing a contribution, transcribers are able to join a message board for their entry to discuss their transcriptions. To be able to discuss the contribution one needs to sign in, but does not need to do so to actually transcribe the entry. There were also no terms of service that required consent before contributing. The main source of accountability to ensure the quality of transcriptions seems to be having more than one person transcribe each entry.
In the wider world of museum citizen science, it is important to consider the realities of crowdsourcing the information or labor for a collection or exhibit. Owens (2013) writes that “most successful crowdsourcing projects do not rely on large, anonymous masses of people” (p. 121), but many of these crowdsourcing initiatives seem to lose traction because they seem to try to do exactly that. Similarly, Noiret (2022) reminds those trying to start similar initiatives that “a [public history] web project is created for and with a specific audience” (p. 41). These authors are trying to advise that not only do museums need to work while considering a specific audience when it comes to these crowdsourcing initiatives, but they also need to work with those audiences to ensure the project is able to get off the ground and complete all goals without losing steam.
Despite these challenges with recruitment and scope of the projects, citizen science initiatives offer “members of the public to participate as amateurs in the production, development, and refinement of public goods” (Owens, 2013, p. 123). This allows the museum to create exhibits that the public will want to interact with—after all, they helped to create it. To do so, museums should consider the four key components of ethical crowdsourcing, listed by Owens: “human computation; the wisdom of crowds; thinking of tools and software as scaffolding; and the psychology of participant motivation” (p. 123). Basically, the people museums get to volunteer are able to figure things out and make judgements in ways computers cannot, are able to collaborate to come up with innovative and interesting approaches to initiatives, use tools to build their efforts without relying completely on them to do the work, and often work for the satisfaction of completing the work rather than for financial or professional gain once their needs are met. Considering all this, engaging audiences in crowdsourcing and citizen science initiatives is naturally an easy way to offer the community engagement and satisfaction with the organization.
Learning how to engage with audiences to support these citizen science and crowdsourcing initiatives will take some work on the part of the museums running them. Ferriter (2016) mentions what the Smithsonian Transcription Center noticed during their crowdsourcing initiatives: “we entice new participants first through brand reputation and social referral and then through media coverage and by sharing site and project updates in social media” (p. 104). If an institution cannot rely on name and brand recognition, they can also “include subject matter listservs, lists of crowdsourcing and citizen science databases, wider press coverage, and in-person events” (p. 104) as ways of recruiting new volunteers to the projects.
References
Ferriter, M. (2016). Inviting engagement, supporting success. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, 12(2), 97–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/155019061601200204
Noiret, S. (2022). Crowdsourcing and user generated content: The raison d’être of Digital Public History. Handbook of Digital Public History, 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110430295-003
Owens, T. (2013). Digital cultural heritage and the crowd. Curator, 56(1), 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12012
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