Year 2 Summit Meeting

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford hosted our Year 2 Summit meeting at their lab on October 15, 2013.  During the all day meeting, we had in attendance:

• Jon Voss, Nick Stanhope, Max Baumgarten and Kerri Young from the Historypin team
• Zephyr Frank, Gabriel Wolfenstein, Matt Bryant, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, Erik Steiner, Sophia Paliza-Carre, and Raina Sun from the Stanford team
• Justin Quimby, Abigail Phillips, and Ethan Watrall from the advisory panel

The morning was dedicated to an overview of our Year 1 reporting and looking at some of the major themes and lessons that have come from the first year of research and experimentation.

From the academic side, Zephyr reported on the importance of the community engagement efforts, which we'll touch on below, as well as the challenges of creating the opportunities for students to participate and how their ability to engage in more depth happens in the summer when they can be employed for more hours.  This underlines the importance of planning for the waves of an academic calendar.

Nick focused on the importance of looking at various types of crowdsourcing and noted that the Year of the Bay and Railroads projects rely on knowledge vs. capacity.  Because we are tapping communities for contributions and information that requires experience and domain-specific knowledge, and is very much not a yes/no or many-hands-make-light-work kind of scenario, we have particular challenges.

One of the major themes that has continually been underlined in year 1 was the critical importance of community engagement and the long lead-time that goes into getting community support and buy-in, and getting to the point where people want to contribute to a project.

Ethan brought a fresh perspective on the project coming in from Michigan State where he's the Associate Director of the Matrix Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.  He was interested in digging deep into the kinds of process and organizational relationships that are necessary to make this kind of collaborative work successful. While these sorts of academic/non-profit or even commercial partnerships are more common in the sciences, they see much less of it in the humanities and is worth documenting best-practices and guidelines for at this stage.  He said:

If crowdsourcing is going to be successful, we as academics need to learn now to work in collaboration and be flexible to find the overlap of the social engagement and outcomes.

 Zephyr mirrored this and added the importance of identifying where crowdsourcing is truly useful and when it is not.  He asked how many academics could tweak their methodology enough to really gain something useful from this kind of interaction.

comparative daily visits for projects

Before breaking for lunch, we zoomed in on community engagement metrics and analysis, looking at some of the approaches that have been employed on Year of the Bay, which Kerri presented.  This included use of social media, targeting particular audiences, using the a "History Mysteries" approach, conducting live events and workshops, one-on-one pinning sessions, traditional media outlets, the role of the Curating the Bay exhibit and the pinning station, putting out questions and calls on existing social media outlets (namely Facebook and Twitter), and harnessing that info for use and recording on the Historypin platform.

Much of this input informed the creation of the prototype version of metadata crowdsourcing tools ("MDCS"), externally known as History Mysteries, or just Mysteries, currently live on the site.  The first iteration of the tool launched in September and it allowed admins to create Mysteries, which were specific questions about metadata, either a title, date, keyword, location, or Street View.  For our first iteration we have been testing with Street View Mysteries and recruiting the public to a set of about 500 images from the San Francisco Public Library collections that had been geotagged, but needed Street View locations.  Traction has not been as high as we expected, and we're working on a couple of possible hypotheses to test.  There is certainly user interaction research to do on the prototype interface, but some of the things we are testing for is narrowing the scope of the Mysteries to one neighborhood, rather than the entire city.

Prototype version of Street View live on Year of the Bay.

Related to this, some of the conversations in the afternoon yielded further input from the team as to ways to engage particular communities, attract a diverse demographic from around the Bay Area, and look at alternatives for content acquisition.

In the afternoon we heard from Ethan about the Quilt Index, which has some similarities to the Year of the Bay and Railroads projects.  The project has been running since 1999, and is now self sustaining (I believe, need to confirm with Ethan).  Some of the key points here were around working with a specific subject matter and passionate community over time, and different ways of engaging those audiences.  This fed in later to the importance of our approach with the Railroads project to share ownership with the community from the beginning, and different ways to insure that connection with the academic community so that the project could be useful or sustained after the official project duration.

Turning our attention to 500 Novels, and shifting gear from Year of the Bay and Railroads, we heard a reporting of the work that Ryan has been leading with Franco using Mechanical Turk to derive emotional ratings of phrases specific to locations from historical novels featuring London.  The team had parsed out phrases and locations from TEI markup of over 250 novels that had location-specific information about different places in London.  We then had budget to run these through Mechanical Turk to have readers rate the emotions of the phrases.  The idea here is that you might be able to say that most descriptions of say, Covent Garden in a ten year period, expressed negative emotions.  This work has enabled the team to iterate and simplify the user interface, which are feeding into the user interface design work that the Historypin team is working on for the public version.  The focus here will be on visualizing the existing data while refining and adding to it.

Conceptual mockup of the 500 Novels interface.

Recapping Living with the Railroads at the SPHTS

On the first Friday of October, 2013, the “Living with the Railroads” team traveled across the central valley to Fresno, CA. We made tracks to the annual conference of the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society (SPHTS), where Professor Zephyr Frank introduced the project to a large evening crowd (other CESTA members included Gabriel Wolfenstein, Sophia Paliza-Carre, and Danny Towns). Gauging reactions during the presentation and the question-and-answer period afterward, we learned valuable lessons for the path ahead. The short version is that we found a community with a staggering level of knowledge, and one interested in what we are trying to develop. 

Although some attendees jokes that we significantly lowered the average age at the convention, suggesting a generational gap, the crowd showed a keen interest in digital methods; railroad enthusiasts are ready and able to get online and use Historypin. Of course, “railfans” like the members of the SPHTS already comprise a very active online community. This raises an important point in crowdsourcing projects. One of the key issues when interacting with any crowd in a crowdsourcing effort is to figure out what benefit they derive from participating. Railfans, for instance, have a strong sense of ownership of their work and are deeply committed to their own approach as an organization, so we must position “Living with the Railroads” more as a useful toolkit than a new and encompassing platform.

  

Some members of the SPHTS felt much more than ready to begin our collaboration--someone asked when he could visit Stanford’s archives to continue his own research. He mentioned “pallets full of Southern Pacific sources sitting in plastic wrap [in Stanford library special collections] since 1996,” a remark which drew both support and dissent from various audience members. There were questions as to the relationship between CESTA and the library archives.  There were also questions on the part of enthusiasts who asked whether Living with the Railroads is intended to generate content (material from the SU library archive) or to host content contributed by others. Our answer was that we are adding content, but the hope for the project is that it leads to content contribution as well as metadata contribution.

Certainly, if there was one thing we learned in Fresno, it was that the railfan crowd has the capability to crowdsource to a depth we only dreamed about. The last segment of the evening program included the SP archivist, David Coscia, scrolling through a series of photographs on the big screen. As he went, he provided the minimal metadata he had for each photograph, but almost immediately members of the crowd shouted out corrections on location, engine class, and even season of the year. They corrected each other and added extra facts when they had them--even identifying a black-and-white photograph of a cargo box as a shipment of sugar beets.

Our next challenge is to figure out how to channel that in-person dynamic into Living with the Railroads. Some of this is about providing a site that makes it possible for people to easily upload materials and add metadata.  But the harder part will be find a way that makes the interactions for a group to be dynamic.  The in-room energy was exciting, and it was clear to us that part of what makes enthusiast communities attractive to people are the in-person interactions. So we will be working on trying to make that possible online, at least in part.

Our venture into the heart of the railroading community proved that there is plenty of potential interest in Historypin and in a collaboration with Stanford via CESTA. However, to earn their trust and participation, we do need to provide new and interesting material to railfans. This may require further dialogue between our team and Stanford Libraries’ special collections. Finally, by incorporating feedback from the convention into the organizational processes of Historypin, the “Living with the Railroads” project can address issues such as copyright infringement, keyword tagging, and collection management. Our Historypin site is nearing its last call, and it appears that the historical and technical societies of California railroad companies are all aboard. Full steam ahead!

Crowdsourcing History Mysteries for Year of the Bay

As we are about to launch new metadata crowdsourcing tools to Historypin's Year of the Bay project, I would like to briefly have a look at one of ways Historypin has focused on user interaction research leading up to this exciting launch. For the past few months, we’ve started crowdsourcing Year of the Bay photo mysteries. Each week, we’ve been picking photos pinned to the project that we need more information on (ones we've either stumbled upon or ones contributed by users and partner institutions) and release them over social media, our chosen platform. Asking for the Historypin mainstays of location and dates if they are needed, we also highlight photos that need business information, specific event information, or any other aspects of a photo that can lead to larger conversations. So far, it has been a great chance for us to harness the power of crowdsourcing to dig deeper into local history, while at the same time helping to build more accurate data for individual and institutional collections. 

How did we want people to interact with this content? For this "history mystery" series we have chosen to drive traffic mainly over social media, as this most recent phase of development is about monitoring interaction over various platforms to inform the development of better Historypin crowdsourcing tools. Posting the photos to our Facebook and Twitter feeds with the hashtag #historymystery, we record not only the comments made but also any analytics to see the kinds of photos users are interacting with.

Our first #historymystery: Photo of an unidentified submarine, contributed by the San Francisco Public Library. We were able to narrow down the date, find the submarine's origin, and lined up a few suggested models of subs.

Basic data collection:

For this experiment, we are managing data over four social media spaces: Historypin's Facebook and Twitter feeds, and Year of the Bay's Facebook and Twitter feeds. To avoid double-posting, we chose to create mystery posts as Historypin, and then "share" them on Year of the Bay's social media channels. 

Over these four spaces, I harvest data on a spreadsheet detailing some basic information obtained for each mystery: date posted, title, links to the original Twitter and Facebook posts, how many retweets, shares, comments, who I specifically targeted to help solve the mystery (if any), etc. Also, because we chose not to drive conversations over Historypin itself, I manually pick out the most useful comments that we have gotten via social media to add as "comments" to the original pin on Historypin, as well as including a link to the original Facebook mystery discussion post for reference. I always make sure to connect with the original pinner as well, to let them know about the discussion happening around their photo. To make such a task more manageable, we release two mysteries per week instead of every day.

After releasing a #historymystery photo over social media, we add the original Facebook discussion thread along with any updated information to the pin on Historypin. 

What has worked best so far:

This crowdsourcing experiment has been a great way to reach out to specific audiences. For instance, we may reach out to local transportation enthusiasts using Twitter to drive conversations around a particular car model within a photo, or work with a neighborhood history group on Facebook to help identify a location they might know something about. Whether calling out to someone directly for help in a mystery post or sending a mystery to them, letting the local community know that we are interested in their expertise and feedback has provided many enriching conversations and interactions around historical content. 

Also, targeting specific individuals and groups has often helped to spread local history conversations farther over social media. For example, asking a Facebook page such as Lost San Francisco for help has in the past lead to their sharing of our mystery posts with its thousands of followers. As Historypin is a global entity, being able to tap into a community specifically geared toward local history such as Lost San Francisco almost always proves fruitful in terms of user interaction.   

One of our #historymystery posts "shared" by Lost San Francisco; as result, the photo received over 7,000 views and 50+ shares on Facebook.

Also, thanking individuals is especially good practice, to let our users know that anyone can contribute and aid in enriching content. A very important aspect of commenting that we aim to encourage is the citing of sources; to that end, we try to tweet about and highlight the practice of users who add comments or suggestions with good citations, such as this incredible map below: 

A map made by user Chris Salvano in order to help us solve a 1906 earthquake #historymystery, one of the best examples of user citations we have seen throughout this series.

What are the problems with this kind of crowdsourcing?

Although we are harvesting data within what appears to be four manageable social media spaces, once a Facebook user "shares" our photo post with their community then this becomes its own post that requires monitoring. For example, if the California Historical Society shares our mystery post, then this becomes a separate post on their wall with its own set of comments, "likes," and shares. Historypin will not receive any notifications for activity there, but instead I will have to manually check it under the "Share" button on the original post. 

Also, "likes," shares, and retweets are not always indicative of how people are interacting with these mysteries. For example, users might want to comment anonymously, and thus may not comment at all for fear of being refuted on a public thread. There also may be pressure to only comment with an "answer" rather than any other kind of observation.

From the managing side, if choosing to keep up with the lightning-fast pace of social media and responding instantaneously, monitoring comments can also become very time consuming if not kept in check. 

Overall observations so far:

One of the best aspects of this experiment is being able to communicate more closely with our user community, both on a local and global level. Releasing the photo mysteries over social media, where communication is instantaneous, produces many "in the moment" conversations in which one comment may spur on an entire thread. These small history conversations, whether a historical factoid about the photo subject or a personal memory triggered when viewing an image, are arguably more important than finding an "answer" to a mystery. 

And though "Likes," "Shares," "Retweets," etc. can only tell us so much about the way our users interact with these photo mysteries, having local history become a regular part of the social media experience is something that this kind of crowdsourcing helps to make commonplace. Local history is also personal history; as the series has progressed, we have gotten more user-submitted mysteries which means that we are able to release a mixture of personal and institutional content for discussion. Ultimately, getting out the idea that solving a local mystery on a global platform is possible, that #historymystery solving can be a social experience, is one of the most powerful ideas behind crowdsourcing for the digital humanities and what Historypin is all about. With the launch of the new metadata crowdsourcing tools, we envision Historypin becoming a hub for these types of conversations, with mysteries solved along the way.   

-Kerri Young, Historypin Project Officer

500 Novels Ramps Up for the Summer

As we’ve begun to scale up our efforts this summer, we have eight full-time research assistants on the 500 Novels project. We’ve been undergoing lots of changes and developments! In order to start off our summer session, here’s a post.

This project, Tagging 500 Novels, seeks to analyze the ways in which physical space and mental constructions of location have worked to organize and represent changing experiences of the city throughout the nineteenth century, a period marked by both a democratization of the novel and rapid urbanization. Specifically, this project will focus on the emotions associated with particular urban locales in London during the nineteenth century, where “the narrative system becomes complicated, unstable: the city turns into a gigantic roulette table, where helpers and antagonists mix in unpredictable combinations” (Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 68). Where there once existed one story, centered on the communal experiences of an insular town’s inhabitants, now a different narrative structure must emerge from the crowd - one that can accommodate the emotional intensity associated with shifting allegiances, geographic displacement, and class antagonisms as lower, middle, and upper classes collide in this newfound urban space. By tracking and mapping these fluctuations in characters’ emotional lives, Tagging 500 Novels hopes to search for connections among particular places and arrive at possible explanations for these trends.

The project has changed slightly from its initial conception. The major change we have experienced is a shift away from social networking toward emotions, gender, and class. We previously wanted taggers to perform anaphora resolution: for each pronoun, find its antecedent (he-->Lord Filroy), as well as annotate each instance of dialogue with regard to the speaker and recipient. Anaphora resolution proved too time-consuming, and it introduced hermeneutical problems that could possibly detract from the other tasks we were asking our taggers to perform. For example, discerning the recipient of dialogue requires contextual knowledge only obtained by reading the entire novel. We found that the best tasks were ones which required no prior knowledge of the literature or of English customs during the nineteenth century.

Moving forward, here are some of our preliminary hypotheses and questions:

-Which regions of the city are most represented? Are some locales predominantly referred to or imagined, rather than rendered explicitly in the narrative?

- Does the spatial representation of certain kinds of emotional experience correlate to known class divisions in the city? Can we anticipate the rise of what Franco Moretti has called the “Third London,” a middle-class “wedge” in the city, through changing fictional representations of this region?

- Do characters of different genders or social classes have different spatial distributions, and if so, what would this mean? Does the mobility of women in fiction increase over time due to rising women’s activity in the public sphere?

In order to investigate these wide-reaching research questions, this project has diverged from traditional humanities research in four distinct ways: by making use of distant reading techniques to glean patterns from hundreds of texts; by using crowdsourcing to gather data from distributed human readers that would be impossible to collect by a computer; by emphasizing the role of space as an actor within literary history; and by attempting to trace changes in the emotional experience of fictional characters navigating physical space.

In our future posts, we will unpack each of these divergent aspects in detail. Stay tuned for “What is distant reading?”

Our Year of the Bay Hackathon at the California Historical Society

This is a cross posting by Kerri Young from the Historypin blog.

http://blog.historypin.org/2013/06/12/our-year-of-the-bay-hackathon-at-the-california-historical-society/

Railroad Enthusiast Advisory Meetings Continued

The Mellon Crowdsourcing project held another meeting in a series of encounters with local railroad enthusiasts on Tuesday, April 30.  Robert Bowdidge, from Google (though in a private, enthusiast's capacity) visited CESTA and discussed his own research and interests, as well as the ways he thought the project might be able to develop with partnerships in the railroad enthusiast community.  Robert became interested in railroads through an interest in local history, particularly involving San Jose and the route to Santa Cruz, which highlighted to the whole group how important this dimension will be throughout the rollout of the project.  It also suggests some interesting overlaps with the Year of the Bay initiative--local connections breed intense interests and the accumulation of knowledge.  Robert highlighted the importance for railroad enthusiasts that their materials be maintained in a sustainable manner (if donated or shared).  In attendance: Gabriel, Zeph, Robert, Sophia, Jon V via Skype.

Cesta 2

Stanford Crowdsourcing Meeting, March 14

PART 1

After six months of preliminary work on the Mellon Crowdsourcing project, the principal participants convened for an all-day meeting in the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.  Present at the meeting were three members of the WAWWD/Historypin group: Nick Stanhope, Jon Voss, and Kate Ferrier.  Also attending from outside Stanford were advisory board members Justin Quimby and Dave Martens.  From Stanford, Zephyr Frank, Erik Steiner, Ryan Heuser, and Sofia Paliza-Carre all attended the meetings at some point between 10 am and 4 pm.

Ryan, Zephyr, and Nick

Our agenda was packed with discussions of work done to date, of next steps, and of more general concerns regarding data management, storage and accessibility.  Nick and Jon kicked things off with a discussion of the Mapcha tool developed by our collaborators at Stamen design, as well as with an overview of how things were progressing on the Year of the Bay project.  The whole group took a look at the King's College London crowd-sourcing paper that Jon V had passed around prior to the meeting.  Therein, we agreed on the desirability of using some of the concepts and terminology presented by the researchers at King's.  Zephyr spoke briefly about the status of the Stanford research and emphasized the importance of:
1) experimental design, both in inputs and tasks and interface (that is, we want to leverage the digital platform to get data on how users deal with different inputs/tasks as well as how different interface designs (games, etc.) influence their activity
2) basic data collection, including better information on current usage stats relating to the Year of the Bay, to be rolled out and extended to the other two projects

Justin chimed in here and throughout the meeting with detailed advice on how to think about metrics.  What do we want to measure and how do we share our measurements with the crowd?  He emphasized, in particular, the importance of relative rankings versus absolute standings.  That is, people care about how they stack up against their friends more than how they are doing against Ms power user.  A detailed summary of his ideas on these matters was promised (and has since been delivered, thanks Justin!)

Zephyr digs into the Maptcha interface prototype by Stamen design on the big screen.

Discussion turned to the 500 novels project, with Ryan taking the lead.  A shift towards geography in the project, namely the identification of places in London (and eventually other cities) and the extraction of other information about those places (moods, class, gender of participants) was proposed.  The Historypin team responded with enthusiasm to the new emphasis on maps.

To be continued...

As an initial pilot project, Ryan suggested using the city of London, where roughly 50,000 mentions of places occur in the corpus of 19th-century novels.  An initial test of what can be done by the crowd will be devised using Mechanical Turk.  A more fleshed out system will follow, mutatis mutandis, on Historypin.

The afternoon session focused on the Living with the Railroads project.  Zephyr showed some examples of photographs of RR right-of-ways with rich visual information relating to native flora versus invasive species.  Richard White, lead academic PI on the LWRR project has indicated a strong interest in identifying plants along the RRs.  Maria Santos, CESTA/Lane Center postdoc, has provided some leads with respect to communities of interest/experts who might be called upon for this kind of work.

Dave Martens spoke about his experiences trying to set up a common space for railroad buffs to share information and archive their valuable collections.  The discussion that followed included questions about where and how materials would be archived, what kind of pipeline might connect Historypin to the website that Dave is developing, and so forth.  These questions of archiving dominated the last hour of our meeting.  Would Stanford step up and provide permanent storage?  How would this relate to other cultural organizations and their content, which might appear in the Historypin interface for YotB and LWRR?

Steiner related his recent conversation with Stanford Libraries in this connection, suggesting that for some datasets, there is a new system up and running that may serve our needs.

Year of the Bay Cultural Heritage meeting

California Historical Society hosted a Year of the Bay meeting on March 11, 2013, which we advertised as

An informal meeting of cultural heritage partners, enthusiasts, developers, and organizers to review the current status of the Year of the Bay project, and the upcoming phases which we're moving into. We'll hear updates from the Historypin team from San Francisco and London, as well as Project Director Jon Christensen.

We had a great turnout, especially given the late notice, with representatives joining us from California Historical Society, SFMTA Photo Archive, San José Public Library, Oakland Museum of California, San Francisco History Room/San Francisco Public Library, and Shaping San Francisco.

Participants shared their plans for current and upcoming exhibits and identified opportunities for collaboration throughout 2013. We talked at length about Phases 2 and 3, and looked at the current status of the Maptcha project by the Stamen Design team, as well as reviewed possibilities for phase 3 content and outreach.

We followed the wider meeting with more specific planning and strategy about incorporating multiple methods of crowdsourcing into the upcoming interactive exhibit, Curating the Bay, at California Historical Society.  The exhibit, curated by Christensen, will feature the Year of the Bay project as one component of how we can all explore and contribute to the evolving environmental and cultural history of the bay.

Lessons from Paul Hagon and Trove

Unfortunately I just missed Paul Hagon's presentation at ALIAOnline in Brisbane several weeks ago, but I did have a chance to catch up with him at the conference and hear more about his latest work.  His presentation looked at some of the lessons learned from the data behind Trove's usage stats and is very instructive to our research as well.

Information online trove crowdsourcing behaviour from Paul Hagon

AHRC Crowdsourcing Survey

At the end of the year, Mark Hedges and Stuart Dunn of Kings College London released their Crowdsourcing Scoping Study, which seeks to "establish a credible definition for, and the current state of the art of, crowd-sourcing in the humanities."  The study was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and has already played an important part in our work for this project.  Our hope is to leverage many of the learnings documented here and begin putting them into practice in the field.

You can download the paper, or learn more about their project.

4 Dev Phases of Year of the Bay and Railroads

We've further refined and defined the four phases of the Year of the Bay and Railroads projects, which are laid out below. 

Phase 1. Use the existing Historypin Project model (with some customization) to brand the project, with the following features:

It will feature the following content delivery tools:

• Easy to use upload functionality to allow user contributions to the project

• Gallery view – allowing easy browsing and selection of all content

• Map view – allowing exploration of geo-tagged content

• Dialogue boxes – for each piece of content, showing meta-data, stories/comments, Repeats (for images), Street View overlays (for images)

• Information and news – a series of tout boxes that provides access to information and news about the project and the partnership

It will feature the following exploration tools:

• Curation of content through Collections and Tours -- ability to allow users to create their own Collections and Tours from existing content, and for the Project to highlight Collections and Tours on the Project page.

• Contribution of individual materials – adding images, video, audio and documents

• Contribution of metadata to individual materials – providing as much as is known about this content, across date, location, tags (including people tags) Street View overlay (for relevant content)

• Contribution of comments to individual materials – by the original user and by any other registered user

• Sharing of content – by email and through Facebook, Twitter and Google+

It will feature the following additional functionalities:

• Batch upload of photographs from other cultural heritage partners

Phase 2. Adding Maptcha, together with Stamen Design

Working with the Stamen team, we'll integrate an experimental module for the public to georectify and explore historical maps. 

Phase 3. User Interaction Research on Multiple Platforms

During this phase, we'll be utilizing a number of existing photo sharing and social media tools, including Historypin, to encourage interaction around content.  For instance, we may reach out to specific audiences using Twitter to drive conversations around a photo that we don't know the location of; work with a neighborhood history group on Facebook to help identify something about a photo, etc. We'll also be doing quite a bit of paper prototyping, and the teams will work to identify some of the ways that we can go beyond simple tasks to community-driven conversation and discovery that can best aid academic scholarship. 

Phase 4. Iterating New Design

Building on the previous phases, we'll launch a toolset designed to incorporate the lessons learned and maximize user contributions in a variety ways within all of the projects. 

Research Questions

Our meeting this past Monday concluded with a series of ideas for framing basic research questions in both the Year of the Bay (YOTB) and Railroads projects.  In attendance were: Jake Coolidge, Ryan Heuser and Matt Bryant from CESTA staff, plus Richard White and yours' truly, ZLF, representing Stanford.  Jon Christensen, UCLA, and leader for YOTB joined remotely, as did Erik Steiner of CESTA based in Eugene OR.  Jon Voss played the central part, orchestrating a discussion from his seat in San Francisco.  Almost a crowd.

The primary focus of the meeting was planning for the launch of phase 2 of YOTB and phase 1 of Railroads.  In addition, important ideas relating to the Novels project came to light toward the end of the meeting.  Without further ado:

Research Questions--YOTB
Riffing on the ideas that he's developed over the past six months in prepping for phase 1, Christensen indicated two primary lines for research: 1) can the local crowd in the Bay Area assist in filling in information in order to answer questions we already have about the environment, urbanization, etc?  2) can the crowd, with its knowledge, help us to generate new questions, to ask things we might not have thought of or thought possible without their help?  We also broached the issue of engagement strategy--how to use the traditional press to get the word out, how to tap into social media.  This led to a discussion of metrics.  How to measure "success" in getting a crowd, holding its attention, and generating powerful research results.  Answers to any of the three components would be valuable.

Research Questions--Railroads
First thing, we came up with a better name for this part of the project: "Living with the Railroads"  The new name puts an emphasis on the kinds of questions we'd like to ask.  White formulated a series of questions he thought the crowd might be able to help answer:
1) basic questions drawing on specific knowledge, such as "can you identify the kinds of trees in this photo taken next to the railway line?" or "what kind of crop is growing next to the tracks?"  The idea is not going to be to identify railroad minutiae per se--what kind of locomotive, etc., but to get the crowd to add information about the environment (natural and built) around the railroads in the 19th century.
2) questions regarding life around the railroad and the towns it passed through, perhaps focusing first on the Southern Pacific.  These might include questions that would draw on the expertise of genealogists as well as railroad buffs; on local history societies as well as institutions such as the CA Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

Finally, Ryan Heuser put forward an idea for using the power of the crowd to read and interpret passages of novels referring to geographical places.  This would use the existing strengths of Historypin and also allow the crowd to jump in and contribute something useful without necessarily having to read a whole novel or even more than a few hundred words around the place name.

...

Today we meet with Dave Martens, railroad expert and potential contributor.  To be continued...

ZLF

meetings, meetings!

Looking forward to planning meeting on Monday.  In particular, I'm looking forward to reporting on progress on both the railroads and novels projects.  Excellent meeting last week with Ryan H, Jake C, and EBS on novels.  Shifting focus to spatial stuff, mapping the emotions of novels in space...  This will dovetail nicely with Historypin's existing capacities and user base.  As for railroads, we have a meeting with Dave Martens on Thursday to get the conversation started with experts in the railroad history community.

ZLF