Crowdsourcing
In crowdsourcing, contributions from the public are solicited to perform certain tasks. This “outsourcing” can scale up certain kinds of research activity, wherein tasks are “outsourced” to the wider community. In the case of the digital humanities, crowdsourcing can include correcting errors in optical character recognition (OCR) generated texts or supplying translations of parts of text. Although it may seem that crowdsourcing is the recruitment of “free-labour”, many scholars argue that the practice is empowering, in which members of the public can potentially engage with history, historical initiatives, and humanities research in general. However, while crowdsourcing allows humanities research to be upwardly scaled, it requires guidance from scholars, and requires a deep understanding of the tasks that are being performed by members of the community (Hedges et al., 2019).
