Long tails and super users anne-alexander
- 1. Beyond 'Long tails' and 'Super users' Reflections on distributed collaboration and 'crowdsourcing'
- 2. What's in a name? • Crowdsourcing (with or without a hyphen) • Peer production • Human computation • Social computing • Citizen science or citizen humanities
- 3. What meanings are we trying to capture? • Is it the distributed nature of production or collaboration? • Is it the digital nature of the communication involved? • Is it the openness of the call to participate? • Is it the social relationship between the parties involved?
- 6. • Are the "super users" more likely to be important to citizen humanities than the "long tail"? - Dunn and Hedges (2012) • Why is important to interrogate the terms we are using and the underlying assumptions they are based on? • What does this binary reveal about the nature of the activities we are analysing?
- 8. Some possible comparators • Labour markets (Uber, Taskrabbit, MTurk) • Commons production (FLOSS, Wikipedia) • Social movements (Occupy) • Computational systems (reCAPTCHA, Duolingo)
- 9. Significance • Valuation of new companies in online labour market sector: Uber raised $1.2bn just for new Chinese operations Taskrabbit $40m in venture funding • Wikipedia: 4,963,037 articles in English version, 26m users of whom 121,000 are active, 1200 admins) • Occupy protests: 951 protests in 82 countries (Guardian, 17 Oct 2011) • ReCAPTCHA: now owned by Google, millions of use instances everyday, feeds into book digitisation, machine learning research and map correction
- 10. Key questions • How good is the 'fit' between the label and what we are analysing? • What are the social, economic and ethical implications of using these labels to describe or analyse citizen humanities projects?
- 11. Characteristics • Labour markets: employer buys a workers' time, rather than owning their body - neoliberal twist on this in most online labour markets (everyone is boss and no-one is allegedly exploited) • Peer production: the process is disassociated from property or contract, (Benkler), although in reality exists in symbiosis with market systems • Social movements: purposive, network-shaped, multi-headed, can be mass information production and distribution systems • Computational systems: humans as processors, run slower cycles and require motivation (because they have free will), but can be integrated as components of computational system
- 12. Implications requester / supervisor / manager / organiser vs worker / contributor / participant
- 13. Implications expert / professional vs non-expert / amateur
- 15. Conclusions • Cannot escape the wider context in which citizen humanities takes place • Design of citizen humanities projects will be affected by all these different ways of conceptualising and organising human endeavour • As well as fitting into the practice of the various scholarly research communities and institutions we engage with
- 16. raa43@cam.ac.uk Anne Alexander (Cambridge Digital Humanities Network / Ethics of Big Data Research Group)