Page 24 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014device) initiatives, as one of the trends to be adopted in a generalised way in the short term. Some who have already walked this road are the 36 initiatives identified by Carletti, Giannachi, Price and McAuley (2013), who note in their analysis two great trends in formulas for involving the public: contributing to existing works or generating new ones.In the first group, habitual tasks are the curation, review and localisation of works. Notable here are the Brooklyn and Steve museums in the United States and thesuch as home videos in the documentary Life in a Day, that compiled 80,000 contributions on YouTube, the pieces from the legendary programme StoryCorps in the United States, the private documents related with wars or the contributions to collaborative maps in acoustic maps such as Soundmap by the British Library.CROWDSOURCING,A FIELD OF RESEARCHThe analysis of all this gargantuan volume of data that users are contributing through networking on the Net, together with the new methodologies that digital tools bring to academic research, has created a new scientific discipline, Digital Humanities. This area of knowledge opens up new fields of cultural exploration which, without the intervention of the Net, the participative culture, crowdsourcing and information technologies, would be unimaginable.Within this field, Antonio Lafuente and Alberto Corsín (2010) have researched into the culture of public ability and science on a historic and anthropological level, connecting the roots of the procommon (common assets) with the new riches and heritage the digital society is generating. One example of all this is free software, whose communities, also called “recursive publics” by Chris Kelty in his book Two Bits (2010), represent new procommons that build, manage and produce on the bases of collaboration, shared knowledge and distributed participation.Creating networks for the exchange of knowledge and best practices is a key factor in a globalised society. Cultural entities are more and more aware of the need to build links with their interest groups by organising a variety of formulae for participation, but also realise that in a world that is so globalised and competitive their survival and sustainability requires the cultivation of peer cooperation. An example of this is the SLIC project that the Medialab‐Prado has been stitching together since 2008 with cultural institutions within its ambit toKröller‐Müller in Holland, which invited their communities to label, document and review their collections.Cultural institutions can involve their publics by inviting them to contribute to existing works or by creating new onesLibraries have also adopted this practice, as in the case of the University of Alabama with a plan to involve volunteers in the labelling of old photographs. University College London has transcribed more than 7,000 manuscripts by Jeremy Bentham by means of a wiki, while the Citizen Archivist Dashboard Project of the US National Archive has a call permanently open for the transcription of Greek papyri in the project Ancient Lives and WW II meteorological manuscripts in Old Weather.Other platforms contribute to this “librarianship” project, although not initiated by major libraries. The Flickr image portal has an agreement with a large number of public archives and invites the cataloguing of historic photos from the macrocollection Commons on its Web‐site. In Spain, the Bookcamping network shares books with CC licences, and in the United States, but with global intent, the incipient Hypothes.is proposes the massive collaborative labelling of all on‐line knowledge.On the other hand, there are many projects that arise precisely from the material contributed by the public that becomes part of the historical heritage,AC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 2: CROWDSOURCING: SHARED CULTURECURRENT PAGE...24