Group items tagged

This reminded me of Cole Camplese's comments on the instant crowdsourcing of video recording the sessions at the 2011 TLT Symposium, Clay Shirky's example of that socially-written mathematics (?) paper, and a bit of Chris Long's posts on using digital tools in research.

The socially-written paper was about "P vs NP", which is a computer science/mathematics problem. A fairly simple explanation is here: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/ But yeah - crowdsourcing stuff like this is great when you have a community of people who really care about it. It's like having an army of amateur archeologists.

It makes me wonder how we might take advantage of crowd sourcing here on campus? I worn if we could open videos to transcription by students or other fiends of the university.

There may be a magic formula involving a distributed community of hobbyists here. There's a lot of interest in the Civil War. The article mentions going to historical societies for help with the transcription. Oddly enough, this is a perfect example of "Cognitive Surplus" in action.

One big message here was pretty clear: Expertise still matters, and crowdsourcing doesn't change that (despite a stunningly silly argument I saw recently online that crowdsourcing laypeople is better than a doctor at diagnosing an illness. I mean, c'mon, let's not be ridiculous.). However, there are a few things going on here - building a community of people creating something based on a shared interest, which has manifold benefits. Cole, your example of transcribing videos....working with say the National Association of the Deaf to gather volunteers would make for a fantastic project. Also, there is a lot of learning potential in something like this. If something is done wrong by the crowd, then that's a teachable moment as to why it's wrong. Then you get a better crowd.

"Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers Lacy Schutz, Project Director Outright: $50,000 To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies."

Interesting list of grant awards in the humanities. The quoted one above jumped out at me, but there are plenty of other good ideas in there. I'd be interested to see what others think.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

Good read on gaming and crowd sourcing to solve long-standing scientific problems.

"In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a "killer app"."