‘Platforms for People-Powered Research’

In April 2021, Co-Investigator Mia Ridge took part in a panel on ‘Platforms for People-Powered Research’ at the ‘Crowdsourcing and the Humanities’ conference hosted by the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at University of Pennsylvania Libraries, The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University Library, the Princeton Geniza Lab, and the Zooniverse. Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is a multilingual crowdsourcing project launched in 2017 to classify and transcribe manuscript fragments from a medieval Egyptian synagogue, and the conference focused on issues relevant to the project including the identity of the ‘scribes’, project management for crowdsourcing in research, and the use and reuse of crowdsourced data.

The panel abstract posed the following questions:

Crowdsourcing projects have the ability to engage everyday citizens with humanities and science research in order to create a more active and informed public. How have people engaged in crowdsourcing within our project, the Zooniverse platform, and on similar platforms? There are so many platforms for engaging the public in making collections accessible. How do different crowdsourcing platforms approach project planning, development, and community engagement?

Scribes of the Cairo Geniza

If you’re interested in hearing some answers to those questions, the video for the panel ‘Platforms for People-Powered Research is now available online.

Moderator: Natalia Ermolaev, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University

Speakers:

• Jim Casey, Courtney Murray, and Justin Smith,Colored Conventions Project and Douglas Day at the Penn State Center for Black Digital Research
• Emily Esten, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
• Caitlin Haynes, Smithsonian Transcription Center
• Mia Ridge, Living with Machines