Uncertainty in Crowdsourced Digital History Projects: The Operation War Diary
Abstract
The seminar aims to understand the different types of uncertainty in crowdsourced digital history projects and how to address them in multiple stages of crowdsourcing. It looks at the Operation War Diary (OWD) to differentiate between the occurrences of uncertainty during the project's lifespan, from creating the documents through their annotation by volunteers to their visualisation. History as a discipline acknowledges its limits within interpreting the sources. These approaches tend to agree that the interpretation provided by historians - despite making the most effort to stay true to the primary sources and their context - is a chosen narrative from the many. We tend to forget this embedded uncertainty when digital methods come into the picture. Also, digital techniques and automation tend to imbalance precision (reliability) and accuracy (validity) by increasing the former at the latter's expense. The question becomes more complicated when the digital history project involves crowdsourcing, as this provides an additional step carrying the possibilities of human or technical errors. The seminar examines how to mitigate uncertainty in the case of the OWD project and - by learning from its lessons - offers recommendations to provide reliable and valid crowdsourced historical projects.
This project is funded by the Friends of the National Archives and hosted at the National Archives UK.
Speaker Biography
Dr Andrea Kocsis comes from an interdisciplinary and international background. Before finding her path in digital humanities, she graduated in Communications, Archaeology, History and Geography and collected these degrees in Budapest, Prague, and Paris. She received her Mphil and PhD in Heritage Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focused on the impact the national WWI commemorations had on the urban landscape of capital cities, London, Paris and Budapest. She used digital humanities methods, such as NLP and GIS, during this research. As a Cambridge – ESRC intern at BT, she took part in distant reading and machine learning research on misinformation, while at the National Archives, she was a Research Fellow in Advance Digital Methods working with the crowdsourced dataset of the Operation War Diary. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor in History and Data Science at Northeastern University London, and she is a Cambridge Digital Humanities Archive of Tomorrow Research Fellow.
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[Image Description: Graphic mashup using Canva. Stories from the Western Front: Everyday life on the front based on the Operation War Diaries. Visualisation prototype by Andrea Kocsis.]
