Monday, April 11, 2016

CROWDSOURCING: Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections Transform/Transcribe & Visitor Speak from the Portland Art Museum

INTRODUCTION

The two projects I chose to compare are from opposite sides of the country and have two very different objectives. Mount Holyoke College’s Archives and Special Collections has implemented a traditional transcription project based on digitized historical manuscript collections under the title Transform/Transcribe. The Portland Art Museum has similarly attempted to solicit visitor participation with their Tumblr page Visitor Speak from the Portland Art Museum, which brings the in-gallery reactions of museum visitors to an open online forum. Both projects directly support the mission of their respective institutions, and have the potential to become long-running participatory programs.

MISSIONS

Mount Holyoke College’s Transform/Transcribe: a Mount Holyoke College History Project directly supports the mission of the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) to “help people transform their lives and our communities through active participation with history, culture, and creativity.” The project has multiple goals:
  • to enhance the metadata associated with digital objects;
  • provide broader access to archival collections;
  • to connect virtual and physical exhibits;
  • to encourage community support for the archives; and
  • to promote the history of the college through identification with the content of archival material.

Mount Holyoke College (MHC) places a high value on its history, and on active student and alumni participation in the creation of documentary heritage. This project encourages “students, alums, researchers, educators, women’s rights activists, and history buffs” to help make documents relevant to women’s higher education, and to a lesser extent lesbian history, more easily accessible. This project started with one digitized collection, “Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley Correspondence” and has added another with the “Caroline A. Henderson Papers”. Both collections document interactions between MHC community members, as well as their experiences with world events.
These digital projects further contribute to the institutional mission in the context of MHC’s “curriculum to career” initiatives: students learn to process collections, write interpretive material and descriptions, and curate exhibits; these transcription projects provide an opportunity for student archivists to work with historical researchers and engage the community in conversations about MHC history, while also gaining digitization, transcription, and data management skills.

As an art museum program, Visitor Speak from the Portland Art Museum aims to provide patrons with an opportunity to reflect on their gallery experience, record their thoughts, and then share them with a broader audience. The Portland Art Museum (PAM) provides postcards and an “interpretive space” on site, then collects and scans the handwritten comments to post on their Tumblr site. This encourages continued conversations with the artwork, rather than limiting interpretation to a static, or one-way, interaction between the artist (or museum) and the individual. It also allows remote visitors to share, comment on, and “like” user and museum content.

Collaborators on The Enclave exhibit and crowdsourcing initiative wrote a fantastic article describing the art and Tumblr project, which can be found online at Art Museum Teaching; the story includes a link to a video by the artist describing the making of the images (Murawski Et al, 2015).

These physical and virtual social spaces support PAM’s mission to “engage diverse communities through art and film of enduring quality, and to collect, preserve, and educate for the enrichment of present and future generations”. Visitor Speak is set apart from other crowdsourcing projects (like many of those described by Carletti Et al, 2013); rather than relying on the expertise of visitors, this project encourages them to reflect on their experience with the art and then places those thoughts in the context of other patrons’ feedback. The museum can use these postcards to evaluate their programming, while patrons are offered a frame of reference for their experience and the option to continue the conversation online. Additionally, the digital environment provides a vehicle for the artwork to reach audiences that are not able to visit the gallery.

By inviting people to share their immediate reaction, the museum is also documenting an aspect of the art-viewing experience that is commonly done in private. Particularly with the first project The Enclave, viewer responses functioned as another element of the art itself, as the artist intended for audiences to be both validated and challenged by their, and other people’s, responses to the work.With the second project, Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy, PAM prompts the audience to answer Yes or No to a specific question about the work shown, and creates a visual argument between the two sides through the website.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS & USER CONTRIBUTIONS

Portland Art Museum

PAM’s Tumblr site uses a clean template that displays the items in a column or grid format (depending on the project). The collections are easy to navigate, but not easy to search. Documentation of The Enclave indicates that there were common themes in the responses, but there is no subject tagging. Tumblr does not allow user tagging, so although they are encouraged to comment and share the images, users can’t apply interpretive metadata to the digital objects. This limits the number of useful contributions a viewer of the object can make. Furthermore, the links between the PAM website and Tumblr are not consistent and there is no explanation on the website about the Tumblr projects. This missing intellectual connection between the physical exhibit and the online component makes it difficult for remote users who happen to come across the images online to understand the context the comments were made in.

The standards for evaluating contributions from the PAM initiatives were difficult to identify. For their first interactive project, The Enclave the museum “printed 7,000 cards, of which around 4,000 were taken by visitors and around 500 slipped into the box in the gallery…[w]ith over 100 posts shared on the site”. (Murawski Et al, 2015) I could not locate any written selection criteria for what PAM chooses to post to Tumblr, but not all cards were put online and it appears that only about one fifth of submissions were posted. It makes me curious what kinds of things were on the cards they didn’t make public and why they were excluded, particularly given that the goal of the artist was to make people confront their own and others’ prejudices. (Murawski Et al, 2015).

Despite the relatively small number of items posted, there seemed to be at least a short period of sustained interest and engagement with online visitors. When describing the impact on digital outreach later in this same article, curators noted: “In five months, our Tumblr site received a little over 1,000 page views: 10% of visitors viewed between ten and twenty response cards in a visit; 5% viewed between 30 and 40; 30% returned to the site at least once and 180 began following the museum on Tumblr.” They considered this a success, and are repeating the program with an exhibit that is up currently. Defining success in crowdsourcing projects can be difficult (Noordegraaf Et al, 2014), and I could not find any specific details for how either project defined or measured success in their project.

Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections

As of this January, 40 people (mostly alumni) had signed up to participate in Transform/Transcribe, making a total of 1,364 edits and completing 108 letters.(Nyary, 2016)

There are 65 folders worth of documents to work on: two are completed, 15 more have been transcribed but not completely reviewed (two of these are in review now), 16 are in process and the final 32 have not been started.

The “History” link for each document shows the list of changes made to that document; these are recorded by date and size of change (in bytes), and also display the Action take (e.g., edited or created). Each action also provides a comparison view so that researchers or transcribers can see the process and changes made. Each document page includes a “Recent Changes” tab which displays the last 75 or so actions taken site-wide. This list includes the user name, item name and location (Box and Folder designation) of edited items and also links to comparison pages and histories for each item. All of these indicators help archival staff and volunteers track who is working on a document and what changes have been made.

The criteria used to select postcard responses for publishing online must be very different from how Archives and Special Collections verifies transcribed text, but I could find no indication of what kind of review MHC transcripts are subjected to. The project FAQ states: “We review the transcriptions whenever we can. It may take up to 6 months before your transcription is reviewed. Once it's reviewed, users will no longer be able to make additional changes and a red box reading "Completed" will appear under the document.” Presumably the text is reviewed by archival staff and compared to the original. Given that many of the contributors are alumnae (the project was launched at an event as part of the college’s Reunion 2015 celebration and recruited their initial volunteers), and thus connected and loyal to both the institution and the idea of community service, the quality of the transcripts is most likely fairly good (Carletti Et al, 2013). Head of MHC Archives and Special Collections Leslie Fields states that one of the benefits of crowdsourcing transcription in an age when cursive is not uniformly taught is that “lots of eyes on the material makes it more likely that all the handwriting will be transcribed.” ASC’s view is that getting the material out to the public will lead to enhanced discovery access in the future; even if transcribers only do small portions of each item, and it takes a considerable amount of time to review and close a document, every new word adds to the searchable text available for the next researcher. (Nyary, 2016)

It was incredibly simple to sign up for and log in to Transform/Transcribe, but the interface of the project is not attractive or user friendly. It was easy enough to figure out how to format transcriptions using the guides provided (a menu containing instructions and FAQ links is anchored to all pages on the site); choosing what to transcribe was another story. Items are organized by box and folder, with descriptive names such as “Correspondence from Jeannette Marks to Mary Woolley”, but with no way to search for particular content. You just kind of have to click randomly until you find something that looks interesting, which is the technique I used to locate a folder that hadn’t been started. This serendipitous approach led me to what turned out to be an incredibly sweet love letter between the two women and, honestly, I am now kind of hooked on the project! The content available in this collection has the potential to draw people in on an emotional level, providing an opportunity for patrons to connect with archival material in a way similar to how PAM encourages its patrons to engage with the works of art in their exhibits.

ULTIMATE GOALS & SUSTAINABILITY

Even though neither of these projects have well articulated standards for assessment, they are set up such that they can easily be adapted for new content and to engage new groups of users. Future art exhibits about contentious issues could solicit user input and newly digitized archival collections can easily be added to the online environment. MHC’s success utilizing student staff and engaging alumnae can serve for the basis of future recruiting of transcription volunteers. PAM’s successful collaborations with artists could encourage other artists to actively engage audiences with future works of art. Strong collaborations between curators and educational staff at both institutions will surely help these initiatives grow in size and thrive.

The ultimate goals for both MHC and PAM are to encourage deeper identification with material content and foster educational opportunities available through their collections. They also share missions that emphasize personal growth through creative engagement with history and the arts. If both projects continue to add to their digital collections and work to better their online interfaces, there is no reason why they cannot make valuable contributions to the education and outreach missions of their respective institutions.

REFERENCES:

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