Crowd-sourcing as a Component of Humanities Research Infrastructures

Abstract

Crowd-sourcing, the process of leveraging public participation in or contribution to a project or activity, is relatively new to academic research, but is becoming increasingly important as the Web transforms collaboration and communication and blurs the boundaries between the academic and non-academic worlds. At the same time, digital research methods are entering the mainstream of humanities research, and there are a number of initiatives addressing the conceptualisation and construction of research infrastructures for the humanities. This paper examines the place of crowd-sourcing activities within such initiatives, presenting a framework for describing and analysing academic humanities crowd-sourcing, and using this framework of ‘primitives’ as a basis for exploring potential relationships between crowd-sourcing and humanities research infrastructures.