Session 5. Digital Cultural Heritage and Public Engagement

Date: Thursday, November 1, 2018, 16h00 (UK time)

Session coordinator: Elisa Bonacini (IEMEST Palermo), Emma Bridges (University of London), Humphrey Southall (Portsmouth)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/UrYKFXpY8Pc

Slides:

Outline

• What do we mean by public engagement?
• Crowdsourcing as a form of engagement
• Wikipedia in relation to engagement/crowdsourcing and democratising knowledge etc. Why experts/students/academics should get involved!
• Some problems with representation on Wikipedia (both in terms of demographics of editors and content of pages)
• Case studies: #WCCWiki
• Case studies: GB1900
• Case studies: #iziTravel

Required reading

• Littlejohn, A., & Hood, N. (2018). Becoming an Online Editor: Perceived Roles and Responsibilities of Wikipedia Editors. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal, 23(1), n1.

Further reading

• A useful blogpost talking through some of the methods of analysing Wikipedia editor surveys, particularly in relation to gender: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/30/how-many-women-edit-wikipedia
• Wikidata Human Gender Indicators : http://whgi.wmflabs.org/gender-by-language.html
• The WCC project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Women%27s_Classical_Committee/Tools_and_guides

Exercise

Following the guidelines in the WCC page (see Further reading), create a new wikipedia entry or modify an existing one. Please, bear in mind Wikipedia criteria of relevance, original content, and conflict of interest.