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!
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