As part of Putting Art on the Map, we ran a series of live crowd-sourcing events. The basic format of these events was to identify a group of artworks around a particular theme, partner with another relevant institution and invite a group of people to come in to collaborate to explore and enrich the artworks with new layers of information. You can read about and see photos from all these events on our here.
This is a worked example of one of the events we ran to demonstrate the steps and methods that we found to be useful to run an event that participants enjoyed, found to be purposeful and captured useful information. This is just one way, not the only way, of structuring an event and it is important to note that this approach is structured around generating participation from a specialist group with an interest in the subject, rather than running an event for the general public who may be newcomers to the subject.
1. Identify a theme and need
Work closely with the curator of the collection to identify a group of content with a shared theme that has a genuine need to be enriched by a particular group of people. This needs to be matched with a group of people who might have the knowledge or experience to help, and it is useful if the people needed form a particular group or association already. Think about the questions that the institution has about the artworks that that group might be able to answer.
Artworks depicting nursing during the First World War; current and retired nurses or medical historians are likely to be able to help.
2. Identify a partner with a network of relevant people
We found that general appeals through an institution’s public communication channels (eg. IWM’s twitter feed) weren’t very successful in attracting participants with the right kind of knowledge or generating high turnouts. It was more effective when we were able to approach a person or organisation that had a strong network of relevant people who could be invited to help. The person who lead the network often knew the right people to invite, a personal invite was more likely to lead to attendance and often the people in the network knew each other so collaboration during the event was easier. Make sure you harness your contact to think about what groups are relevant and involve them in the planning so you choose suitable times and locations.
We approached the archivist at the Royal College of Nursing who identified interested and relevant participants (eg. retired nurses interested in history, former military nurses, people writing books on First World War nursing) and was able to ensure that the event happened at the best time for them to maximise attendance.
3. Select a space
We ran events in a wide variety of spaces, from museum educational suites to shipyard warehouses and pubs. So in many ways the space doesn’t matter, as long as you know what it will be like and what limitations it might have (eg. no wi-fi) or opportunities (eg. electronic whiteboard). However, it is useful to pick somewhere that makes it easy for participants to attend, such as it’s familiar or they are already there for another activity.
Meeting room at the archive of the Royal College of Nursing HQ
4. Introduce the project, it’s purpose and why you have approached this group
Inviting people to contribute information to a collection during an event is unusual, so it is important to explain the purpose of the project, why you have asked them, what information you are looking for, how the session will work, what will happen to the information, how they can stay involved. Explaining a clear structure, purpose and need was very important in ensuring participants feel valued and their contributions are useful.
IWM has a series of artworks depicting nursing activities during WWI and we are not sure if the captions are accurate, or what some of the specific activities are, or what kind of people are depicted (eg. are they a military nurse or a volunteer nurse?)
5. Share printed copies of the artworks and project digital ones onto a screen
Projecting a digital version of the image onto a screen means that everyone can see it and you can benefit from things like being able to zoom in and highlight particular parts. However, many people also like printed copies to see detail and colour better, and it means that they can annotate them.
6. Work as a single group
Aim to have 10 – 15 people, then you can all look at images together. This is beneficial as it means that you pool the knowledge of everyone there – if people work in smaller groups or pairs around particular images, you have a smaller knowledge base. It also generates more opportunities for questions, conversations and debate.
7. Have 2 facilitators (specialist and non-specialist) to ask questions and prompt the group
Having someone to guide the session is essential. One person who does not share the specialism of the participants can be useful as they might ask questions that participants assume are known (eg. what is that medical instrument, what does that badge on the nurses uniform mean?). But it is also helpful to have someone who is knowledgeable about the topic so can guide more subject specific conversations.
We had someone from Historypin and the archivist from RCN helping facilitate.
8. Go through each artwork
Project a single artwork onto the screen. For each one, start off with some of the questions that the curatorial team have identified (eg. identifying unknown elements, checking if the curatorial caption is correct) or things that a non-specialist is curious about. People will also start to volunteer information and a conversation will develop around it. Go through each artwork in turn. Have more artworks than you need, and when you take a break you can invite the participants to look through them and see which ones they would like to explore. This is useful as people can match their skills and interest to the collection.
Someone who had worked as a military nurse was able to add lots of information to a painting showing a military train moving injured soldiers
9. Have a single person recording what’s said
It is useful if this person can type notes into a document alongside the images during the session. This person should understand the kind of information the project wants to capture (eg. factual data rather than anecdotal stories) so that they can record the most relevant parts of the conversation for the project. They should be part of the facilitation team, and able to interject into the conversation to ask participants to clarify what they mean, spell things, give reasons for their suggestions etc.
10. Wrap up and follow up
Re-cap on the purpose of the project and the next steps – where the information will go, if you re running more events, how people can carry on participating (eg. with a tool, on Facebook, send an email).
1. Identify a genuine need in your collection and a group that you think has the knowledge to help. We observed that when there was a close match between the subject matter and a group who had a similar level of knowledge and experience, there was greater depth of engagement, contributions were more useful and participants’ enjoyment was higher.
2. Target specific groups or individuals with a shared interest. We found that targeted invitations was more effective at securing high attendance and effective participation than broad invitations to large general interest. Building a relationship with a well connected person in that group was also useful, as they were able to harness their social ties to invite people which was more effective than impersonal invitations from an institution.
3. Build your event around the group that you want to work with. If you want to engage the local history society whose members know about boat building, run your event in their space after their afternoon meeting, not in the museum on the weekend.
4. Use a combination of good quality print outs and high resolution images wherever possible. Both help participants to engage with each other, the images and find details that prompt discussion and research routes.
5. Encourage people to bring their own digital devices to help people to research simultaneously and reduce how much equipment you have to provide.