Beyond the West: Community Engagement and Education

I welcomed the surprise I received when visiting the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre (TAEC) in Luang Prabang, Laos. The TAEC is much  more than a conventional contemporary museum space; it is, in fact, what a museum should be. Yes, the TAEC has a collection, exhibitions, displays, and even a café and boutique store. However, it also offers free entry for Laotians, runs activities with schools and other local groups and offers 50% of store profits back to the communities that made them. Not only does TAEC take part in these projects, it runs a school outreach programme, where staff visit local primary schools with cultural and/or historical objects and discusses issues around community, identity, and preservation. Furthermore, they take on young people from ethnic minorities and let them stay in Luang Prabang city to uptake an internship at the centre. The selectees are provided with invaluable knowledge in the cultural, heritage, and tourism sector and learn skills in curatorship, ethnology, and critical thought. They also run workshops for those already in the tourism and/or heritage sector, from teaching them best practice to supporting them in exhibition design. It is currently planning to build a public resource room. All this and the TAEC was only founded in 2006.

The current exhibition “Stitching Our Stories” was what initially sparked my interest. It was conceptualised in 2012 as collaborative exhibition with profound educative results. The exhibition was the brainchild of Allison Milewski of PhotoForward, who discovered the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre (TAEC) and proposed the joint effort.

Cultural Crowd-Sourcing: Education, the State, and the Internet

Creating the Museum 2.0 

As formally discussed, I claim that Social Constructivist education applied in the museum can lead to a more democratic society; at it’s core this relies on the long standing ideal that knowledge is power. Creating well-informed citizens helps them locate their historical and cultural sensibilities, enabling them to become historically informed makers of history. A democratic society cannot exist in a society where the distribution of knowledge is imbalanced. This notion relies on a more democratic structure of cultural heritage sector.

Cultural heritage institutions have conventionally been constructed as elitist institutions, first belonging to royalty and later the bourgeoisie. It is common for Western museums that over 80% of visitors are of European descent, which does not reflect todays diverse communities. They are also well-educated and from higher socio-economic groups. Unsurprisingly, these statistics are reflected in the staff of the museum (educators, registrars, curators, directors). This creates exhibition displays, and their subsequent narratives that are more easily identifiable by those who are more affluent. Whereas those who do not belong to this narrow group are unable to identify with museum displays. This leads to a boycott (conscious and sub-conscious) by the proletariat and minority groups. This not only continues the current cycle, but further widens the gap between those who posses knowledge and those who do not. It is reasonable to say and is agreed upon my many Art Historians (Sandell, Hooper-Greenhill, Bennett, Duncan, Anderson, etc) that the museum has remained the same since it’s existence as the princely galleries, with restricted access to the public. Those that purport to be public galleries today may give the community physical access, but this does not mean all visitors require the tools necessary to identify with and interpret museum displays and narratives. This is heightened by the fact that these displays are not telling “their” histories.

My previous solution to these problems lay within the application of a recently developed digital tool that at it’s purest is intrinsically democratic: crowd-sourcing. Digital crowd-sourcing projects are more wide reaching, in theory, crowd-sourcing can also be carried out physically at the cultural heritage institution. This tool can be used to gather histories untold and exhibitions can be collaboratively curated with narratives, language, and objects that are more easily identifiable to those outside the conventionally exclusive group of museum visitors. Not wanting to sound overtly ideological I do realise that, so far, crowd-sourced projects in the cultural heritage sector have largely failed at creating un-biased results and have failed to reach a much wider audience (Your Paintings Tagger, Transcribe Bentham). Projects need to be mediated in an un-bias way, be free of commercial interests, and be able to reach far within the community.

To accomplish this we need:

Museums, Crowd-Sourcing, and Social Constructivism.

After a long decision-making process, I have come to the conclusion that the inherent ability of museums to facilitate social constructivist education is also a potential property of crowd-sourcing. You can always rely on Dewey!

For now, here is something on Dewey and the museum.

Constructivist education that is offered by cultural heritage institutions is able to promote social justice and democracy. ¹ For John Dewey, education should not be based around the teaching of mere facts and figures, but integrated with everyday life, instead of separated from it. For him, cultural heritage institutions were able to make connections between the dichotomy of education and everyday life. Because of their inherent ability to facilitate immersive, self directed, creative, collaborative, critical, inquiry-based learning partnerships between museums and schools, they are able to provide children connections with their culture, community, and history. Today George Hein, a leading scholar that fosters discourse on education in the museum, believes museums have a social responsibility to educate. Cultural heritage institutions are a considerable public investment, so to not allow the wider public to use its services represents wastefulness. ² Hein sees museums education as inseparable from political and social action as the ‘process of education is never neutral’ and can not be separated from a political purpose. ³ With that being said, education can lead to a stronger democracy, as democracy relies on an informed public. A democratic cultural heritage centre can contribute toward a more democratic society by “helping visitors develop their historical sensibilities, strengthening their ability to locate themselves in time, and enhancing their capacity as citizens to be historically informed makers of history”.⁴

1John Dewey, Democracy and Education, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan Company, 1916 ). p. 92.

2 George E. Hein, “Why Museum Educators?”, Keynote paper, ICOM-CECA Annual Conference (Zagreb,18 Sept 2011) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEqPCoTz79U&gt; (accessed 06 September 2014).

3 Ibid.

4Mike Wallace, “Museums and Controversy”, chapter in Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). p. 128.

Definition

I decided I needed to look more thoroughly at a definitive definition of crowdsourcing, as the phenomenon is often confused with other forms of digital interaction.

The burgeoning phenomenon of crowd-sourcing suffers from being relatively new and ill-defined, so I begun my literature inquiry in a search of texts that aim to give a definition of what crowd-sourcing is. To pin down exactly what crowd-sourcing is has proved difficult; Enrique Estelles-Arolas & Fernando Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara published information concluding that between 2006 and 2011 there were 40 different definitions of the term found in 32 articles. ¹ The Oxford English Dictionary ,  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , and Collins Dictionary all contained very similar definitions of crowd-sourcing. The Oxford English and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have similar entires around obtaining information and services from a large group of people, but the Collins Dictionary defined it as an ‘unspecified’ group of people, which I think is more appropriate. The Power Thesaurus lists synonyms of crowd-sourcing, which creates further confusion. Synonyms listed were:

Collaboration
Cooperation
Outsourcing
Collaborative Working
Human-based collaboration

Crowd-based outsourcing
Human-based computation
Joint working
Partnership Working
Peer-production

The blurring of lines around its definition are caused by the term being identified with any type of collaborative web-based activity like open innovation and co-creation.  Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara examine definitions of crowd-sourcing to establish elementary characteristics and an exhaustive definition. Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara’s study on the definition of crowd-sourcing is well researched by the way of a systematic review of literature. From their study they developed a definition:

Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that what the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken.

In the seminal article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing (2006) by Jeff Howe the term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined. The article largely consists of crowd-sourcing examples, it is his definition from his blog that is most quoted in literature:

Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

Daren Brabham is also a long time scholar of crowd-sourcing and offers another well cited definition: ‘Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model…’. ³ In his text, Crowdsourcing, Brabham begins by examining what crowdsourcing is and what it is not. He looks at concepts and theory, participatory culture, issues of crowd-sourcing, and popular examples. He is able to look at crowd-sourcing from different perspectives such as: its contributions in the business area, the technological focus in computer sciences, and the focus on crowd, motivation, and participation in the humanities.

1Enrique Estellés-Arolas and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, “Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition”, Journal of Information Science,vol. 38, no. 2 (09 March 2012)

2Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: A Definition, Crowdsourcing (blog), (02 June 2006) <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html&gt;  (accessed 05 August 2014).

3Brabham, Daren,”Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 14, no.1 (2008). pp. 75–90.

About Literature

The interdisciplinary nature of this topic has led to a wide range of sources, including those focussing on museum and heritage studies, commercial entities, governments, and marketing. With text by curators, museum professionals, computer technicians, software developers, and entrepreneurs. Authors from varying backgrounds have created a diverse output of material with different perspectives on the use of and theory of crowd-sourcing. A large amount of texts are collaboratively written, which reflects the nature of their research- a focus on a phenomenon with much potential to promote collaboration and participation. These texts have a breadth of relevant information to contribute to the field. This project focuses on a digital phenomenon, therefore it is fitting that seminal writings are not just found in books or scholarly articles, but in blogs. Important sources for this topic reside on the internet in the form of websites, open-source journal publications, online conference presentations, discussions from innovators in the industry, and even social media. The importance of social media has been prominent, with twitter playing an important role in industry conferences. Tumblr pages (Such as The Digital Museum and  Crowdsourcing the Museum) Blogspot ( Open Objects , Museum 2.0 ) and WordPress ( DIGITAL@HE[ART] ) all feature digital art history professionals. Using blogs for information can be problematic as they can consist of personal viewpoints, and informal research, and bias statements. The opposite is said for institution websites which have to conform to their institutions political, economical, and social agendas. Clearly there is a relatively limited scholarly text on crowd-sourcing in the cultural heritage sector, and even the wider humanities sector. Therefore it is hard to make solid judgements on the outcomes of crowd-sourcing, so at this time it seems logical to make judgements on what is successful and what is not. This lack of academic literature means less conventional sources, such as blogs and conferences transcripts will be used. The texts previously mentioned either discuss crowd-sourcing or digital art histories, but rarely both. My aim is to bring these two fields together.

Pros and Cons of Crowd-Sourcing

I thought making a list of the pros and cons of crowd-sourcing would help generate ideas and kickstart research areas.
This list will be a work in progress. Please let me know if you have anything to add.

Pros

Free Labour
Lower cost
Efficiency
Wider knowledge base
Able to select best ideas from the ‘crowd’
Access to a high number of volunteers
More variety
Engaging public
Marketing/advertising
Learning new skills
sharing expertise
Connecting ideas
Creating collaborations-larger brain power
Increasing contributors self-worth/self-esteem
Educating collaborators/volunteers
Increasing institution’s visitors
Enabling people normally unable to participate with the museum/gallery (due to health/economic problems)
crowd-sourcing allows more people to access a larger, universally shared set of resources.
Achieving goals the institute would never have the time, financial or staff resource to achieve on its own.
Processes large sets of data at a fast rate
building new virtual communities
Actively engaging with the community
Using the knowledge and expertise of the community

Cons

Less credible results
Manage a large scale of volunteers
Time consuming
Volunteers can produce as little or as much as they want-can be at leisurely pace
Crowd not in your control
Can not filter results
Quality control-no barrier to entries
Have to sift through lots of ideas/entries/results
Needs a project manager
Need IT manager
Needs development of new software/ algorithms
Third parties commercial motivations
Digital Labour
Exploitation

Everyone is a Curator

The purpose of this project is to investigate the way crowdsourcing is employed by art galleries and museums to promote their establishments and engage with a wider audience. I will do this by exploring contemporary methods used and evaluate their results.

Through examining examples of crowdsourcing projects that have been carried out by cultural institutions I intend to prove that the integration of the cultural with the digital will improve knowledge of the masses as well as improve scholarship and academic research. We can design cultural digital spaces that are inclusive, opposing conventional ideals of exclusivity and hierarchy in art galleries and museums which will engage and build a deeper connection with institutions and the public. Crowdsourcing is able to open up new academic collaborations, between institutions and individuals, therefore increasing participation through a collaborative knowledge base, open new fields of inquiry, and circulate scholarly research freely. It is able to improve knowledge of academics and working class people alike.

The role of museums and art galleries extend beyond mere preservers of objects. The discipline of art history does not rest upon the physical art objects (sculptures, painting etc); it’s value is the scholarship it is able to distribute. Crowdsourcing enables institutions to circulate knowledge to those beyond its physical walls as the internet disregards time and distance. It creates a two way relationship where the public are able to freely give feedback to institutions that can be used for improvement and future operations. Through crowdsourcing it is no longer one person’s voice, the curator, but a collaborative experience of the larger community. This puts audiences own interpretation of an object or exhibition in the foreground. I hope to demonstrate how cultural institutions can use crowdsourcing as a means to include a wider audience and enable this audience to interact with collections, which ultimately inspires them to be creative. It gives the public ownership and agency on unprecedented levels. Furthermore, this builds on social histories, an important but often forgotten theme in state and city museums, and creates additional meanings to the physical objects.

This digital turn can change peoples perceptions of museums; it is a way to transform traditional institutions from old-fashioned, stuffy, and conventional to innovative, open and interesting establishments. Museums and galleries should all invest in increasing digital presence as it allows multiple platforms for different people to interact with cultural objects in different ways. Soon gallery and museum collections will not be defined by their physical nature.

Jessica Neve