Ten Most Wanted: Hunting down missing information about cultural artefacts Marcus Winter, University of Brighton; Susan Lambert, Arts University Bournemouth; Phil Blume, Adaptive Technologies

Editor's Notes

1. Talk about the Ten Most Wanted project, which explores game-based crowdsourcing to enhance collection data at the Museum of Design in Plastics The project runs from May 2013 to April 2014 and is supported by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. Like all projects in this programme…
2. … it has 3 partners: MoDiPArts partner UoB Research partner ATLTechnology partner
3. Here’s a quick overview of our talk: 1 - The problem we address(Susan) 2 - Research aspects(Marcus) 3 - Design decisions(Phil) 4 - How it works(Susan: example) 5 – Wrap up(Marcus)
4. The project was Phil’s, idea. His firm, Adaptive Technology, had built our website. This is a typical page - Phil was shocked by how much information was missing. We don’t know who designed or made it.
5. This is not of course uniquely MoDiP’s problem but is shared by many different types of collections. This slide gives some examples.
6. It isn’t that in each case the information is necessarily very difficult to find but that there are so many objects and there isn’t the time to do the work. Shared with the public it becomes doable and also engages people who may never visit the physical collection with it in a meaningful way.
7. These aspects of the problem… - many objects with missing information - requires detective work, not special skills or tools - secondary agenda: audience engagement. … make it ideal for crowdsourcing… … which is a term coined by Jeff Howe to describe the practice of using the Internet to outsource work to a large number of individuals.
8. Crowdsourcing has been used in various contexts in the cultural heritage sector. Looking at Oomen & Arroyo’s classification how crowdsourcing can support “the digital content lifecycle in heritage organisations”, we can see that most crowdsourcing projects, especially game-based ones, fall into Classification and Correction & Transcription   We focus on Contextualisation where people go out and discover facts that are missing in the collection data --- Oomen, J. & Arroyo, L. (2011). Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges. In: 5th International Conference on Communities & Technologies. Brisbane, Australia - 29 June – 2 July 2011. Available http://www.cs.vu.nl/~marieke/OomenAroyoCT2011.pdf
9. There are many different interpretations and, in fact, typologies of crowdsourcing. Some key aspects in this context are level of engagement, task difficulty, collaboration and level of co-determination in projects. Ten Most Wanted looks at game-based crowdsourcing, and in particular the more complex end of the scale, i.e. exploratory multi-user games that require sustained engagement and social interaction. --- Ridge, M. (2011). Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections. Proceedings of Museums and the Web 2011. Available: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/playing_with_difficult_objects_game_designs_to Haythornthwaite, C. (2009). Crowds and communities: Light and heavyweight models of peer production. Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (pp. 1–11). IEEE. Retrieved from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4755627
10. We have 3 main research questions, including: - How to design and facilitate complex crowdsourcing games - How to integrate found information with the collection data - How to deal with intellectual property issues in a transparent, non-limiting way that keeps our players happy. --- Now Phil will talk about some key design decisions relating to these questions.
11. Although we see today as the real launch of the game, it has had a soft launch vis volunteers connected to Adaptive Technologies. We already have two and almost three solved cases. I am going to talk you through this one. We knew the name of the manufacturer although we hadn’t been able to find out anything about the firm. We also knew it was a patented design. We wanted to know who hade designed it and when.
12. People in Brighton, London and Canada helped in the search. The case got going by someone finding the patent was taken out by an Ernest Harrison of Bury in 1932. Someone else found that the manufacturer was also located in Bury; that the clips were exhibited at the White City British Industries fair in 1934; and that Ernest Harrison and Byson were associated together with at least 9 patents suggesting that Harrison was either an owner or employee of Byson.
13. Someone else had a collection of the clips that he had gathered together when renovating a 1920s house and sent us a picture of them.
14. And finally, after the involvement of six different people, the case was solved. The last piece in the puzzle was the discovery of Rosemary Phillips’s Canadian website which mentions her grandfather, Ernest Harrison, beginning a creative career in 1927 with the invention of a bread slicer. Contact with Rosemary revealed that, yes, Ernest Harrison was the inventor of the carpet clips and also the owner of the Byson company, plus a lot more information. Rosemary has now signed up to play the game and is encouraging her friends to do so.
15. To wrap up what we have learnt so far: Curated case notes seem a good way to:> summarise findings> present evidence> credit players Game mechanics and reward structures are a difficult topic due to participants’ different backgrounds and motivations The “crowd” has amazing expertise: we were really surprised at the quality of responses