Ian McDermott’s original proposal:

I’d like to propose a General Discussion/Working Session hybrid about the D. James Dee Photo Archive, approx. 250,000 transparencies, slides, and negatives documenting contemporary art in NYC (particularly Soho galleries) from the late 1970s – present. Artstor acquired the archive this summer and is in the process of figuring out how to digitize it and, more importantly, catalog it. The collection isn’t cataloged and the slides aren’t labeled so any effort to effectively describe it will be a collective effort. I’m curious to hear what people think about crowd sourcing, tagging, and any other ideas. The BBC’s Your Paintings project is one example of a successful tagging project but what about extensive crowd sourced cataloging, how much metadata is needed before images are released, is it best to open the cataloging to everyone or a select group?

Existing projects resources:

• Tagasauris
• Metadata Games – NEH-funded project up at Dartmouth
• NEH details and white paper for Metadata Games
• National Archives Citizen Archivist tagging
• Zooniverse – science crowdsourcing but also starting to do some humanities
• New York Public Library Labs does a lot of crowdsourcing
• DuoLingo – language teaching tool that is also crowdsourcing translation
• Article on “rules” of crowdsourcing: t.co/FOxmZLssvC
• Flickr Commons
• Steve Museum – www.steve.museum/
• A write-up of 36 crowd-sourcing projects: t.co/6W0ashpOe9
• Dutch company, Picturae — best known for mass digitization, but also software development

A common theme as people introduce themselves is wanting to get *good* tags in addition to tags at all — possibly using controlled vocabularies.

Ian asks whether people do know of available tools to use — there are problems with using vendors, and there are other problems with “rolling your own” platform. One participant records Artsy’s experience using Mechanical Turk: it took a developer a couple hours to sync the database with Amazon’s, and thereafter it cost about 1 cent per image even with having about 5 people tag each one. Concerns, though, with labor ethics and with image rights.

The Carnegie Mellon program had a Teeny Harris program to get people to identify who’s in the photo.

John Resig brings up a case where a lot of crowdsourced work that had happened over the course of years was replaced in an afternoon by an advanced “computer vision” technique that helped identify things in photos. General point: before you turn to crowdsourcing, talk to advanced computer scientists to make sure that there’s not a computational technique.

Participant wonders what information would be most needed: gallery, creator, year, people, etcetera.

Amanda brings up LibraryThing’s Legacy Libraries and suggests having a “barn-raising” — an event to engage the community as well as to get some items tagged or cataloged. Ian agrees it can be a terrific jumpstart in particular. Participant raises the issue of how you reach people who “aren’t on the Internet all the time.” John Resig also raises a concern about just expecting people to do all the work: important to “chunk” the work so that it’s doable. At the same time, there are many people who do care passionately about particular items or topics. Participant raises the topic of errors in crowdsourcing: Ian mentions that many projects will only accept data once it has been verified by multiple people. Participant brings up the example of the Steve.Museum, where the curation had to happen after all the tagging. John Resig talks about how often it takes thousands of cases in order to train computer software, so unless your set has thousands and thousands of items, in some cases you might as well just do the work manually yourself, or crowdsource it.

Participant brings up search by image — how does it work? John is going to talk about some of that in the next session.

• Lesson plan for the workshop I taught
• Omeka.org – server-side, self-hosted version of Omeka
• Omeka.net – hosted version of Omeka
• Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century
• Modern Art Iraq Archive

Charlotte Frost’s slides are available at docs.google.com/file/d/0B58JIugj8WHHMlVvT1R1RUd0d2M/edit and are embedded below.

These days, any scholar or organization with a collection of primary sources such as photographs, drawings, paintings, letters, diaries, ledgers, scores, songs, oral histories, or home movies is bound to have some of this material in digital form. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for cultural heritage professionals that is used by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers all over the world to create searchable online databases and attractive online exhibits of such digital archival collections. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of websites built with Omeka, define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka, go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (NOT an iPad or other tablet). Learn more about Omeka at omeka.org and omeka.net, and see the full lesson plan for this workshop at amandafrench.net/2013/11/12/introduction-to-omeka-lesson-plan/.