After participating in these examples of crowdsourcing, I have come to a greater appreciation for the scope of possibilities for Digital Humanities endeavors – projects like these demonstrate the importance of wider public engagement with material that DH interacts with. After all, DH allows for as many new ways of presenting, visualizing, and disseminating information as much as it does for recording, archiving, and studying it. Crowdsourcing is one such method, whereby volunteers are called to participate in digital processes that contribute to the project at hand; in doing so, as Ridge et al. explain in the Collective Wisdom Handbook reading, “crowdsourcing increases public access to cultural heritage collections while inviting the public to engage deeply with these materials” (3). One of the more common forms of DH crowdsourcing is the task of digital transcription, whereby participants transcribe the text of digitized sources in order to expand electronic archives and help preserve the words of the originals. The transcription guidelines and formatting rules vary by project, but the overall task of transcription effectively invites and engages participants due to its mechanical simplicity. Despite some of the example projects having rather intensive guidelines, such as Transcribe Bentham, it does not require any background knowledge of the source content nor technological expertise. Some more modern projects, like the Library of Congress’ For the People and the Library of Virginia’s WWII Navy Separation Notices projects, feature more streamlined interfaces that make the process quicker. Additionally, other forms of rote tasks like OCR correction for the Virginia Chronicle provide a similar approachable experience. These, in my opinion, represent the best tasks to be given to crowdsourcing approaches: those that are mechanical in nature, but need important human oversight.

Regardless, simple tasks like transcription also require participants to engage with the material as they read, type, and proofread their efforts; hence, participants both contribute to expanding digital access and recordkeeping of the sources while also learning from them. Causer, Tonra, and Wallace of the Bentham Project reading states that the goals for Transcribe Bentham included “engaging the public with Bentham’s thought and works” just as much as it was about expanding their digital archive, illustrating this principle (120). Thus, when kept to approachable tasks like transcription and editing, crowdsourcing proves a suitably important tool in expanding the interdisciplinary scope of DH from not just between scholars but also between the broader public. This is a very important part of retaining public engagement, just as much as attracting it in the first place. Abby Shelton et al. in the reading for the For the People project posit that volunteers “consistently ranked making collections accessible, giving back to the public good, an interest in the campaign content, a desire to learn and improve their skills, and participating in a supportive community” as the most common reasons given for continued participation. The authors of Transcribe Bentham also report similar findings, explaining that early volunteers were motivated “by a specific interest in Bentham himself, general interest in philosophy and history, or an interest in crowdsourcing,” demonstrating the importance of technological accessibility and the content itself (Causer et al. 127). My experience participating in these projects aligned with these reports because being able to contribute to something in the field of History that also matched my interests highly motivated me to keep going, especially when the technology was easy to use. For instance, I enjoyed reading the contents of the newspapers in the Virginia Chronicle project while knowing that my edits to the OCR will help preserve and enhance access of that same content to other interested individuals. Thus, I think that to maintain engagement from people like me and those in the readings, crowdsourcing projects need to clearly demonstrate how volunteer contributions matter towards the project’s greater goals – not just for digital access but for greater social engagement.