Making Space to Talk

Communities & Crowds is an AHRC-funded (2021-24) collaborative project between volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, National Museum of Scotland, and Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium, Chicago. The Communities & Crowds team used an action research approach to test out how local in-person volunteer researchers might be supported within a cultural heritage institution (CHI) to lead the development and creation of a crowdsourcing project relevant to their own interests and aspirations. In this article we use the Communities & Crowds experiments at the National Science and Media Museum as a case study to draw out how co-creation and action research can be brought together with online crowdsourcing to enrich volunteering experiences and institutional knowledge about GLAM photographic collections. We argue that the careful co-creation of bespoke spaces for conversation and critical reflection were essential to the successful realisation of an online crowdsourcing project on the platform Zooniverse.