The NEH has announced the award of a Cooperative Agreement to Dartmouth College and University of Maryland for a May 2015 event entitled “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines.” In addition to support from NEH, additional funds have been provided through a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support travel and attendance costs for additional attendees. MITH Director Neil Fraistat and Andrea Wiggins, Assistant Professor in the UMD iSchool, will work as Co-PIs with Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth to plan the workshop, which will occur at The University of Maryland from May 6-8, 2015.
The workshop will culminate and then broaden the conversation begun in the two small face-to-face regional meetings and two webinars that are taking place through the auspices of Dartmouth’s 2014 Institute for Museum and Library Services-funded National Forum in Crowdsourcing for Libraries and Archives: Creating a Crowdsourcing Consortium (CCLA), also directed by Flanagan. Through this 2 ½ day capstone event, 50 scholars will be brought together from several disciplines as well as representatives from 10 funding agencies in order to consolidate the earlier work of CCLA and seek to advance a truly national, cross-disciplinary agenda. The workshop will also support crowdsourcing efforts among digital humanities groups, museums, libraries, and archives by linking their work to computer science and social science communities and forging a collective consortium.
The ultimate goal of the event is to assemble collective knowledge about the potential for crowdsourcing infrastructures, content and tools, in order to build an important intellectual and networking bridge for crowdsourced research projects and advance a national and cross-disciplinary agenda.