Challenges in designing cultural heritage crowdsourcing: Tools with indigenous communities

Digital preservation of palpable and intangible cultural heritage, including the curation and re-contextualisation of Indigenous Knowledge (IK), has lately gained great prominence, especially in an era where new technologies offer enhanced User Experiences (UXs) such as augmented and virtual realities. Practices in cultural heritage collection have moreover shifted towards greater community and citizen involvements, thereby opening-up a myriad of perspectives and sources, which eventually allow for differently depicted narratives and voiced viewpoints. Besides a number of conceptual and practical benefits, the complexity of such a movement is reflected in the challenges encountered in the design and use of technological systems supporting such heritage-gathering processes. As such crowdsourcing platforms have been developed and deployed to support diverse stages of cultural heritage practices. Among others they facilitate open calls to a crowd which are asked to perform specific tasks, such as uploading stories, photos, validating historic accounts, etc. From a literature and case study analysis Noordegraaf et al., (2014) derived a number of conditions for crowdsourcing designs, which directly implicate the success or failure of organic preservation projects such as the Red een Portret (Save a Portrait) and photo-tagging the Vele Handen (Many Hands). Moreover, an adequate alignment of workflow, communication, motivation, and targeting strategies has directly affected the recruitment and retention of “the crowd”, thereby implicitly directing account and outcomes obtained. A well-known example of this is the Wikipedia platform, which, having attracted only a homogenous group of editors in its aim to capturing “all human knowledge”, has thereby created a systemic, westernised bias in the portrayal and representation of knowledge (Gallert and van der Velden, 2015).