What value is there in crowdsourcing archaeological research?
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Hello,
This is Chiara. I am a researcher on the AHRC-funded project Crowd and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.
As part of my role, I am currently working on the development of a methodology for assessing the value of using crowdsourcing and crowd-funding to engage online communities with archaeology and the human past. In doing so, I am building on some prior research I have done on public perceptions and experience of archaeology through museum visitation, television viewing and digital media, but also on motivations for and the value of digital cultural engagement with museums and heritage more widely.
The opportunity of studying how crowd-sourcing can facilitate participatory kinds of archaeological research is really an exciting one. In this blog post, I would like to say a few words on the three main reasons why I think that this evaluative work is important.
1. Promoting cross-fertilisation and inter-disciplinarity. Crowd and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research will test a mixed contributory, collaborative and co-creative model of public engagement with archaeology. Given its aims, the project can be situated within four disciplinary areas at least: public archaeology, cultural heritage studies, museum studies and the digital humanities. The evaluation of our participatory model for community archaeology will draw on and feed into all of these domains, offering a unique chance for inter-disciplinary thinking and dialogue and yielding potentially far-reaching scientific impact.
2. Contributing to a sociological ‘movement’ in Public archaeology. In Europe, Public Archaeology is increasingly understood as the area of research concerned with studying the relationship between ‘archaeology’ and ‘the public’ in order to improve it. Despite this being a widely acknowledged thematic focus, Public Archaeology literature has rarely addressed the topic of the public consumption of archaeological data, materials and knowledge. As a result, very little is known on how people understand archaeology, why and how they engage with it.
Through the evaluation of our project, we aim not only to advance current knowledge on archaeological audiences, but also to develop solid methodologies that can be used, in future, by researchers interested in undertaking similar studies. To put it boldly, we wish to contribute to the growth of a sociological ‘movement’ in Public Archaeology, encouraging research that utilises theory and methods from sociology as well as archaeology to shed light on the nature of people’s engagement with archaeological heritage.
3. Helping to understand ‘value’ in digital engagement with cultural heritage. Recently and, possibly, partly as a result of the economic crisis and the higher pressure for justifying public expenditure, greater attention has been devoted to try and define the value of research in the humanities. At the same time, within the cultural heritage sector, increasing efforts have been made to understand how heritage can contribute to positive social change (e.g. to wellbeing, recomposition of conflicts, etc).
We would like to take part in this debate, and examine what value there is in joined up research into the human past whereby ‘traditional’ academics and other archaeological enthusiasts collaborate via crowd-sourcing.
If you are also researching value within the cultural heritage domain (and beyond), please get in touch!
We are very interested in exchanging ideas and open to exploring possible collaborations.
Thank you!
