Understanding Uncertainty in Crowdsourced Digital History Projects – The Operation War Diary

Kocsis, Andrea (2022) Understanding Uncertainty in Crowdsourced Digital History Projects – The Operation War Diary. In: Digital Humanities Congress 2022, 8 September 2022, University of Sheffield.

Abstract

The paper aims to understand the different types of uncertainty in crowdsourced digital history projects and how to address them in multiple stages of crowdsourcing. To achieve this aim, the paper looks at the Operation War Diary (OWD) to differentiate between the occurrences of uncertainty during the project's life-span starting from the creation of the documents through their annotation by volunteers to their visualisation and user interaction. History as a discipline acknowledges its limits within interpreting the sources. These approaches tend to agree that the interpretation provided by historians - despite making the most effort to stay true to the sources and their context - is a chosen narrative from the many. When digital methods come into the picture, there is a need for a digital data managing and analysing framework which enables the historian to handle the uncertainty embedded in the sources, rather than dismissing it and working only with the certain data leaving the false negatives containing useful information out of its database. The aim is to find a balance between what MacEachren called precision and accuracy (1992), or what Earl Babbie named reliability and validity (1975). Both taxonomies differentiate between those two qualities of research which decide if the research runs methodologically correctly and/or reflects reality. Digital methods and automation tend to create an imbalance between precision (reliability) and accuracy (validity). They increase the former at the expense of the latter. The question becomes more complicated when the digital history project involves crowdsourcing, as this provides an additional step carrying the possibilities of human or technical error and misinterpretation. The paper reviews the taxonomy and uncertainty models in the literature which are relevant to the OWD, secondly aims to provide its own model, and finally offers recommendations to provide both reliable and valid crowdsourced historical projects.

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