Crowd- and Community-fuelled Archaeology. Early Results from the MicroPasts Project

Citation

Bonacchi C, Bevan A, Pett D & Keinan-Schoonbaert A (2015) Crowd- and Community-fuelled Archaeology. Early Results from the MicroPasts Project. In: Giligny F, Djindjian F, Costa L, Moscati P & Robert S (eds.) CAA2014 21st Century Archaeology: Concepts, methods and tools. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. 42nd Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Paris, 22.04.2014-25.04.2014. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 279-288.

Abstract
The MicroPasts project is a novel experiment in the use of crowd-based methodologies to enable participatory archaeological research. Building on a long tradition of offline community archaeology in the UK, this initiative aims to integrate crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and forum-based discussion to encourage groups of academics and volunteers to collaborate on the web. This paper will introduce MicroPasts, its aim, methods and initial results, with a particular emphasis on project evaluation. The evaluative work conducted over the first few month of the project already demonstrates the potential for crowd-sourced archaeological 3D modelling, especially amongst younger audiences, next to more traditional kinds of crowd-sourcing such as transcription. It has also allowed a comparative assessment of different methods for sustaining contributor participation through time and a discussion of their implications for the sustainability of the MicroPasts project and (potentially) other archaeological crowd-sourcing endeavours.

Keywords
Crowd-sourcing; crowd-funding; Public Archaeology; online communities;