Crowdsourcing Scholarship – more updates from the Networked Scholars book

I am editing, revising, and re-writing various parts of my book, Networked Scholars. I still like the name, but I mentioned the other day on Twitter that I should rename the book to “Yes, but…”  because of the complexities and intricacies inherent in the use of social media for scholarship (as in “yes scholars network, but privilige permeates networks”). Or because I now know that trying to synthesize  research my colleagues and I did over the last 6 years isn’t an easy feat (as in “Yes, I’ll write this book, but I am  looking forward to turning my attention to other activities”).

Today I was writing about crowdsourcing and networks as places of knowledge sharing, creation, and dissemination. Here’s a relevant piece:

While Tufecki (2014) convincingly argues that practices may differ from one social media platform to another, and big data analyses focusing on one platform may not transfer to others, one common element in the use of social media for knowledge production and dissemination is the concept of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing refers to the process of gathering contributions from large groups of individuals in order to solve a common problem or tackle a challenge. Though readers may be familiar with modern crowdsourcing examples that are mediated by technology (e.g., wikipedia as a content crowdsourcing platform), the practice has long existed before the rise of social media. For instance, the design of the Sydney Opera House was crowdsourced. It was based on a 1955 international design competition that received 233 entries. Crowdsourcing content and ideas characterizes social media use, and scholars have capitalized on this practice to gather readings for their syllabi, activities for their courses, resources for their research, and other input – including effort – intended to solve scholarly problems.

[Not included in the book: A fun but could-have-held-my-iphone-more-horizontally picture of the lovely Sydney opera house I took a while back]

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1 Comment

  1. Yes, George, I too like very much the idea of crowdsourcing. As a matter of fact, it occurred to me some months ago the idea of crowdledge, which I see as a knowledge that *emerges* from Big Data analysis of individuals’ spontaneous digital footprints from Google searches, posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. A crude explanation is available here: bit.ly/1goEJfn. Now I’m working it up in a scientific paper to THESTE.

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