Citizen Science in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums: SEI at the Digital Humanities Conference

Sarah presented the results of interviews that form part of her PhD research, which investigates how GLAMs may use digital citizen science as a tool for engaging more diverse audiences with their collections. The research is partnered with RBG Kew who run a citizen science project tasking volunteers to transcribe specimen labels into a digital format. Sarah’s research aims to understand who takes part in these types of projects and why; and if they can be designed in a way that increases the diversity of the volunteers who engage with them.

As part of this research, interviews were conducted with the coordinators of 9 different digital transcription projects, to answer the research question: why is a citizen science approach used for these projects? Semi-structured interviews with the project coordinators were completed over zoom, and thematic analysis conducted using NVivo.

The results of this showed that many projects choose a citizen science approach because they have previous experience of working on this kind of project, or have seen how it is a successful way for institutions to digitize their records. In some cases, project teams had citizen science researchers embedded in the project, so were not only using the project to make the archive material accessible to researchers and the public, but also to research the method of citizen science itself.

The interviews also gave insight into why people take part in these citizen science projects, and what barriers there are to participation. These results will be combined with surveys of citizen science volunteers to better understand participation.

Sarah’s work is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH).