This is one of an occasional series linked to a course I am doing as part of my PhD at Sheffield.
This week’s seminar was about user involvement and I want to share some thoughts about the ways in which one of our sample sites has tried to get people involved.
The site I’m thinking about is Olanordmann.co.uk.
I want also to refer to an article by Trevor Owens: Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down.
Ola Nordmann is a site using virtual reality to recreate the experience of Norwegian immigrants who travelled to the USA. It was hoped that this would encourage younger generations to identify with those early immigrants and that this would inspire people to share their own stories. Collecting these on the site would create a rich resource for family historians and indeed any sort of historians. But it too did not generate the kind of interaction that the authors were hoping for.
Contrast this with the article by Trevor Owens and we begin to see how easy it is to get things upside down. Owens writes of his team’s surprise at the willingness of contributors working for free. So what went wrong?
One issue is clearly that of cultivating a sense of belonging, even a sense of achievement. Leader boards, ‘badges’ and the like may seem cheesy but they work. For an example we need look no further than TripAdvisor.
But another issue seems to me to relate to the digital divide between audiences for whom internet involvement is second if not first nature and those born before, say, 1980 who are converts.
If we look at Norwegian immigrants, it is interesting to check with the website of Norwegian Embassy to the US. The prime period for Norwegian immigration is, according to them, broadly speaking 1825 to 1925. The youngest immigrants would therefore now be in their nineties and their children in their sixties. Neither generation grew up with virtual reality, indeed with the internet. They may well be very familiar with the stories granny told and they may well be very proud of their heritage but they may not be savvy internet users and they may not feel happy about posting their stories to a website. The third generation are likely to be busy and less involved.
But the idea was a good one and the stories should be collected.
So, when designing a site such as this, someone needs to consider the demographics. The target audience is not university students and staff with high level IT skills, but they are still useful informants. Liaison therefore with an intermediary might help. In the UK, for example, the University of the Third Age caters for huge numbers of over fifties in search of intellectual challenge in retirement, which probably overlaps with the kind of people Trevor Owens is writing about. Museums use volunteers, again mature citizens with a wish to be intellectually active, and a recent event in York showed that this existing link can act as a conduit for crowdsourcing.
Sometime the solution to a digital problem lies outside the digital world.
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