Today, crowdsourcing has become a major way for creators of digital humanities projects to both receive help with their projects, while also engaging and allowing members of the general public to become involved in these projects. Crowdsourcing involves bringing in members of the public, who lack a vested interest in the project, to perform certain tasks necessary to complete the project. By engaging these volunteers and sparking their interest, they become invaluable in contributing to the success of a digital humanities project.
There are a variety of different tasks that can be completed by members of the public that help to enhance a project. The tasks given to volunteers should be ones that are fairly simple, require no prior knowledge or experience, can be explained in a simple manner, keep the contributors interest, are interactive, and allow people to see the results of their work. Since contributors are volunteers, the tasks given to them should be ones that be easily picked up and anyone can understand with a simple explanation. These task must also be ones that will attract contributors to the project and keep them interested in contributing. The most common tasks given to contributors are transcription and correction. Transcription involves typing out and creating an accurate copy of the text contained in a digitized page of a manuscript. Correction involves editing and making changes to a transcript already created. Both of these tasks can be completed by individuals with very little training or prior experience.
In trying to attract contributors to a particular project it is important to keep in mind the type of tasks that will attract contributors to the project. Most individuals will contribute to a project for a variety of different reason. These reasons include: that the project falls within their particular area of interest, they are made to feel like they are contributing to something greater than themselves, and they feel as if they are giving something back by contributing. The developers of the project need to ensure that they clearly communicate with contributors what tasks they will be completing, why those tasks are important, and what is the long term goal of the project/what is the project trying to accomplish. Explaining all of the different elements of the project and recognizing the importance of the work done by contributors, allows those contributors to feel engaged and eager to contribute to the project.
Another important factor for keeping contributors engaged with a project is the kind of interface provided for them to work with. The best way to keep a contributor engaged is to have an interface that is simple to use and that does not require a large amount of time or effort to learn. In personally contributing to different crowdsourcing projects, I found myself enjoying the ones with the simpler interface more. While I did enjoy contributing to both Trove and the Paper of the War Department, I found that I enjoyed contributing to Trove more because I was able to learn how to use the interface almost immediately, this is compared to the interface for the Papers of the War Department that took me several minutes to figure out all of the different functions in the tool bar. Since contributors are volunteers using their free time to contribute to a project, the interface should be something fairly simple for them to understand and use.
