Workshop // 4B 

// Session 4B //
Crowdsourcing digital crime history

This workshop will explore how online platforms can today be used to engage community volunteers in the process of digitising and researching crime histories. Drawing on the convenors experience of two different crowdsourcing projects, the Prosecution Project and Criminal Characters, the challenges and opportunities that this burgeoning research methodology opens up for crime historians will be considered. The workshop will also focus on the practical aspects of setting up such crowdsourcing projects: the ethical issues that need to be addressed; how volunteers can be recruited and kept motivated; and the different technological tools available for establishing crowdsourcing projects. Workshop participants will then be given a brief guide on how to establish a crowdsourcing project on the Zooniverse platform.

About the Convenor

Dr Alana Piper is a Chancellors Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her research interests draw together the social and cultural history of crime with criminological, legal and digital humanities approaches. Her current project, Criminal Characters, uses digital history to chart the lives and criminal careers of Australian offenders across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has authored over 40 academic publications, and is currently an investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Sex and the Australian Military, 1914-2020' (2021-2023) and the ARC LIEF project 'Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia' (2019-2021).

Resources

• Crowdsourcing Resources