REMEMBRANCE IN THE CITIZEN HUMANITIES

Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap Sociologiska institutionen

REMEMBRANCE IN THE CITIZEN HUMANITIES

Co-producing memories and historical knowledge

Maria Sicilia

Title: Remembrance in the citizen humanities: Co-producing memories and historical knowledge.

Author: Maria Sicilia Supervisor: Per Wisselgren

Abstract: This dissertation explores the relationship between remembrance and citizen humanities. Combining the study of three qualitative empirical sources (an explorative comparison of five citizen humanities projects, an autonetnography conducted in one of the projects and the observation and analysis of the interaction of the online community in said project) the epistemic culture in citizen humanities and how remembrance is enacted in this context are addressed. The findings indicate that the participatory epistemic culture inherent to the citizen humanities allows a limited number of participants to transcend the roles that are assigned as mere data collectors, pursuing their own independent research projects. In this context, remembrance takes place in two levels, first by creating cultural mnemonic manifestations in the form of searchable metadata, transcribed data, digitized objects, images and rerecorded stories and second, by the act of creating knowledge and sharing it with the community. Finally, it is suggested that in the context of the citizen humanities, the traditional dichotomy of history vs. memory is challenged by the figure of the citizen historian, as this subject creates historical knowledge but also enacts mnemonic practices exemplified by the creation of cultural mnemonic manifestations and by recalling, recognizing, and localizing memories, both their own and from others.

Keywords: Citizen Humanities. Social memory. Cultural memory. Participatory Epistemic cultures. Knowledge co-production.

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Significance of the study……….…..…..………..^.6

1.2 Purpose of the study and research questions……….………^.7

Chapter 2: Theoretical background

2.1 Participatory epistemic culture of citizen humanities……….…^.…...……^.8

2.2. Crowdsourcing, participation and co-production in the humanities……….….…..……..…….……9

2.2.1 Types of task processes...9

2.2.2 Degree of participation………..10

2.2.3 Reciprocity……….…..….….11

2.3. The intersections between remembrance, history and digital media………...12

2.3.1 History and memory……….………...…..^.12

2.3.2 From collective memory to social and cultural memory……….……..……13

2.3.3 Remembrance in the digital media: digital archives and citizen humanities……….………..…..……..14

Chapter 3: Methods

3.1 Explorative comparison……….……….16

3.2 Netnography……….…..…17

3.2.1 Auto-netnography………..…..…18

3.2.2 Forum content analysis……….……….…..20

3.3 Ethical considerations………..……….…..22

Chapter 4: Results

4.1 Explorative comparison: The context of knowledge co-production in memory-focused citizen science project………..23

4.1.1 The role of memory as presented by the organizers……….…23

4.1.2 Comparing knowledge co-production processes in memory-focused citizen humanities……….25

4.1.3 The question of reciprocity……….….27

4.2 Autonetnography in “Every namecounts”………..………….28

4.2.1 About the tasks………..………..28

4.2.2 Getting help from the online community………..^...29

4.2.3 Learning and remembrance: a personal experience……….….30

4.3 Content analysis of the “Every name counts forum”………..…..……..32

4.3.1 Beyond transcribing and cataloguing: Volunteers doing their own research………..……….……..32

4.3.2 Using hashtags as a collaborative tool………..…….33

4.3.3 The community challenges the technological infrastructure……….….….34

Chapter 5: Discussion

5.1 Transcending assigned roles in participatory epistemic culture………..…36

5.2 Remembrance in citizen humanities……….….…^….37

5.3 The “citizen historian”: a contesting subject to the history/memory dichotomy………..38

Chapter 6: Conclusions

6.6 Limitations……….…….….………...….40

References

Chapter 1: Introduction

When accessing Every name counts, one of the twenty history projects currently hosted by the Zooniverse-the largest citizen science web portal, were volunteers from all around the world can contribute to different research projects-we can find the following introductory text:

The Allies liberated the concentration camps 75 years ago. This year, the corona pandemic has made it impossible for people to come together at memorial sites to remember the many millions of victims who were imprisoned, exploited, and murdered there by the National Socialists under inhumane conditions. The “Every Name Counts” project provides a simple way for anyone to take part in active remembrance without leaving the house¹

Every name counts is a people-powered research project initiated by the Arolsen Archives, an international centre on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. With the introductory text, the researchers from the Arolsen Archives are in some way trying to attract participation equating voluntary work to a form of remembrance. Creating knowledge by improving the access to digitized documents is seen also as creating memory that otherwise would be lost in the immensity of millions of documents in an archive.

During the last decade citizen participation in science has noticeably increased. The phrase citizen science was first coined in the nineties and defined by the sociologist Alan Irwin both as “science which assists the needs and concerns of citizens” and as “a form of science developed and enacted by the citizens themselves” (Irwin, 2018). According to Bonney et al. (2009:11) scientific investigations include many processes in which the public can be involved including choosing or defining questions of study, gathering information and resources, collecting data, analysing data, discussing results and asking new questions.

However, citizen science has been predominantly performed within the realms of the natural sciences (Crain et al., 2014). According to Tauginienė et al. (2020:2), the underrepresentation of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in citizen science can be explained by the long-lasting bonds between citizen science and the natural sciences, the enduring controversy over the legitimacy of SSH and its academic status, affecting funding schemes and the methodological and ethical concerns when dealing with sensitive SSH

1 https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cseidenstuecker/every-name-counts/about/research

topics. Despite this underrepresentation, the digital turn has provided new technologies for the creation of digital platforms that use crowdsourcing as a means to engage the public with cultural heritage and history (Hepler and Wolfenstein, n.d.).

Citizen history refers to citizen science projects that are centred around historical research questions, often with education goals for participants as an equally important goal for success as the research questions themselves (Schmalz and Haley Goldman, 2020).

Most citizen social sciences and humanities projects ask for transcribing handwriting, identifying elements in graphic material but also tagging images, identifying people or places, text encoding, translation, etc. , activities that could be defined as task-based interaction (Sverson et al., 2019:3). In some citizen history and heritage projects, the public participates by providing historical data connected with their own experiences and individual and/or collective memories. These interactions occur in technology-mediated environments that take advantage of the collective efforts and wisdom of the crowds and have proved to be a useful method for approaching cultural heritage and humanities sources during the last years (Reinsone, 2020:186).

According to Hedges & Dunn (2017) participants benefit from being personally introduced to diverse cultural heritage materials and empowered to engage as volunteers.

However, as Reinsone (2020:202) points out, digital participation not only promotes deeper familiarity with cultural heritage but also enables a dynamic interaction between past and present on a personal level. A form of collective memory occurs also in this context as the specific form of knowledge co-creation in a digital environment allows an ongoing relationship between the present and the past that is shared by an online community.

1.1. Significance of the study

The literature about heritage crowdsourcing and citizen humanities has proliferated during the last years. The main foci have been the user (engagement frequency, proficiency, motivation, etc.) and methodological issues as term definitions or creation of task typologies. The recent publication A History of Participation in Museums and Archives, edited by Hetland et al. (2020) introduces some new interesting perspectives as democratizing infrastructures in citizen participation or epistemic culture in citizen humanities (a concept that would be used in this essay). However, the relationship between remembrance and citizen science has not been widely explored. For this reason, this study

can be an opportunity to contribute to a better understanding of citizen humanities as a unique context for collective remembrance.

1.2. Purpose of the study and research questions

The aim of this study is to get a better understanding of how knowledge is co-produced in citizen humanities projects that deal with questions related to remembrance and of how the relationship between history and memory is shaped by the epistemic culture existing in those projects.

RQ1. How is knowledge produced in citizen science initiatives connected with topics of social, cultural and historical memory?

RQ2. How does remembrance take place in the context of knowledge co-production in a digital environment?

RQ3. What are the epistemological implications of knowledge co-production in citizen humanities for the relationship between memory and history?

Chapter 2: Theoretical background

This chapter provides the literature and concepts that serve as a theoretical foundation for this dissertation. It starts with the introduction of the concept “participatory epistemic cultures” by Kasperowski et al. (2020) as a framework to understand how knowledge is produced in citizen humanities. Secondly, under the section Crowdsourcing, participation and co-production in the humanities, different typologies and concepts explaining tasks, contributory models and reciprocity in the citizen humanities are described. Finally, the third section attempts to (selectively) synthesise the vast literature that deals with the convergences between remembrance, historiography and digital media.

2.1. Participatory epistemic culture of citizen humanities

Kasperowski et al. (2020) introduce the concept participatory epistemic cultures to address the transformations in the humanities´ disciplinary practices that occur in Citizen Science projects as tasks become collective and distributed by technological means. The concept epistemic cultures was developed by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999) to define the diversity of reasoning and ways to establish evidence according to different scientific fields. Knorr- Cetina showed that in different fields of research, the individual person is either minimized as an epistemic subject (in that responsibility and authority are dispersed) or in contrary, the individual researcher remains recognizable, embodying the production of knowledge.

According to Kasperowski et al. (2020:242-243), the humanities fall in the second category.

This is manifested by individual authorship but also by the idea of Bildung, an epistemological ideal that implies extensive individual knowledge and education as a prerequisite for informed reflexion and interpretation. Citizen humanities, by making the knowledge production collective and distributed, challenge the notion of the recognizable individual epistemic subject that bears responsibility and authorship in the traditional humanities. To mobilize a many contributors as possible, the required qualities from volunteers must be standardized and distributed, with classification tasks that are simple, yet relevant and valid. Kasperowski et al. (2020:245) suggest that when designing citizen humanities projects, the epistemic subject is not conceived of in terms of interpretative abilities and Bildung. This creates a paradox, as the act of mobilizing the masses through tasks that do not recognize the individual epistemic subject-and in instead relying on highly

distributed cognition- stands in contrast to the humanities understanding of extensive education and expertise. However, some volunteers move beyond simple tasks to perform rich interpretations, enacting what the authors call participatory epistemic culture in which volunteer contributors, during the process of solving tasks, casual talk and by interacting with researchers, formulate new research questions. During this process the volunteer contributors transcend the original distributed collective endeavour and roles they were originally assigned (Kasperowski et al. 2020:254).

2.2. Crowdsourcing, participation and co-production in the humanities

In order to get a better understanding of how knowledge is produced in citizen science initiatives connected with topics of social, cultural and historical memory, five cases will be analysed paying attention to analytical units informed by a variety of typologies, models and concepts suggested in previous literature about crowdsourcing, participation and co- production in the humanities and heritage institutions.

2.2.1 Types of task processes

Dunn and Hedges (2013) propose a model for describing and understanding crowd-sourcing projects in the humanities by analysing them in terms of four key facets – asset type, process type, task type, and output type – and of the relationships between them. For the explorative comparison of projects in the present dissertation, the typology for the facet process type will be used as an analytical unit. According to Dunn and Hedges (2013:156), a process is composed of tasks through which an output is produced by operating on an asset.

Asset refers to the content that is transformed during the crowdsourcing activity. Processes are conditioned by the kind of asset involved, and by the questions that are of interest to project stakeholders (both organisers and volunteers) and can be answered, or at least addressed, using information contained in the asset. They identify the following process types:

● Collaborative tagging: users organize information assets by attaching tags to those assets. Tags can be based on existing controlled vocabularies, but are more usually derived from free text supplied by the users themselves

● Linking: covers the identification and documentation of relationships between individual assets.

● Correcting/modifying content: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and speech recognition can be error-prone, and any such enterprise needs to factor in quality control and error correction, which can make use of crowd-sourcing.

● Transcribing: one of the most prominent areas of humanities crowdsourcing, as it can be used to address a fundamental problem with digitisation, namely the difficulty of rendering handwriting into machine-readable form using current technology

● Recording and creating content: Processes in this category frequently deal with ephemera and intangible cultural heritage. Frequently this takes the form of a cultural institution soliciting memories from the communities it serves.

● Categorising: Categorising involves assigning assets to predefined categories; it differs from collaborative tagging in that the latter is unconstrained.

● Cataloguing: Cataloguing – or the creation of structured, descriptive metadata – is a more open-ended process than categorising, but is nevertheless constrained to following accepted metadata standards and approaches. It frequently includes categorising as a sub-activity

● Contextualisation: a more broadly-conceived activity than the related process types of cataloguing or linking, and it involves enriching an asset by adding to it or associating with it other relevant information or content.

● Mapping: the process of creating a spatial representation of some information asset(s). This could involve the creation of map data from scratch, but could also be applied to the spatial mapping of concepts, as in a ‘mind map’.

● Georeferencing: the process of establishing the location of un-referenced geographical information in terms of a modern coordinate system such as latitude and longitude.

2.2.2 Degree of participation

The three models of participation proposed by Bonney et al. (2009) in Public Participation in Scientific Research have been and still are widely applied for categorizing participatory

projects within the heritage and humanities domain. The level of the required expertise of users, and the interaction with the ‘host’ stakeholder increases with each model:

● Contributory projects. Designed by scientists. Members of the public primarily contribute collecting data.

● Collaborative projects. Designed by scientists. Members of the public collect data but also help to refine project design, analyse data or/and disseminate findings.

● Co-created projects. Designed by scientists and members of the public working together and for which at least some of the public participants are actively involved in most or all steps of the scientific process.

Co-creation will require more engagement than adding a tag as part of a contributory project. In general, contributory projects will be able to attract a broader community, as expertise in the field is not required.

2.2.3. Reciprocity

Hetland (2020) has discussed the importance of building knowledge infrastructures in citizen science that facilitate reciprocity. While volunteer motivation to participate in citizen science has been largely studied (Nov et al., 2011; Curts, 2015 and Jennet et al., 2016) are just come examples). Hetland considers reciprocity in this context a relationship not only based on one-way motivation, but one where all parties gain something. In citizen science, the uploading and downloading of information represents this reciprocity. While volunteers contribute collecting data for the project (and this is seen as uploading information and an act of giving), they also download information (receiving). This activity includes keeping a private field diary, looking at pictures, recent records, statistics and inventories, and searching information or data for management or research.

The importance of voluntary contributors to get access to the information projects is also stressed in the The Ten Principles of Citizen Science by the European Citizen Science Association (Robinson et al. 2018): “Citizen science project data and meta-data are made publicly available and where possible, results are published in an open access format. Data sharing may occur during or after the project, unless there are security or privacy concerns that prevent this”.

2.3. The intersections between remembrance, history and digital media

2.3.1. History and memory

Memory and history are concepts deeply connected but not without important tensions between them. In his posthumous book, Thinking the Twentieth Century (co-written with Timothy Snyde) the historian Tony Judt highlights this complex relationship:

I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag (Judt 2012: 277)

Judt argues that these mnemonic manifestations of the past are inevitably partial, insufficient and selective and that those in charge of elaborating them are sooner or later forced to tell half-truths or even blatant lies. For Judt, these cannot replace history in any case. However, this understanding of memory and history presents some problems, as history is written by people in the present for particular purposes and the selection and interpretation of sources are, in some extent, arbitrary.

In relation to historiography, the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992:23-23) considers history as dead memory or as a way of preserving the past without the organic experiential relation that characterises collective memory, considering the last one as the active past that forms our identity. Olick and Robbins (1998:110) suggest that while Halbwachs devalues history’s epistemological claim in favour of memory, on a deeper level, the distinction and relationship between the two concepts is very similar to the one done by traditional historians. For Olick and Robbins (1998:110) “the distinction between history and memory….is a matter of disciplinary power rather than epistemological privilege”. Memory plays an essential role in the conception of history and historical past, as Koselleck (2004:258), has suggested implying that these are constituted of experiences and expectations that produce a relation between the past and the future. The consideration of the dynamics between history and memory constitutes the core of the formation of collective and cultural identities, because memory and acts of remembering allow us to assert ourselves as a group or individual against the passing of time (Ricoeur, 2004:81).

The French philosopher Pierre Nora (1989:5-8) intended to establish a new relation between history and memory, one in which history is again reinscribed into the consciousness of people, into their memories. This implied a move away from history’s perpetual suspicion of memory and its true mission: “to suppress and destroy it”. In this post-colonial view of history and memory, the first is identified with the powerful (or the colonizers) while collective memory is associated with the subaltern (indigenous, working class, etc). For Nora (1996:xvii) , A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community. It may refer to any place, object or concept vested with historical significance in the popular collective memory, such as a monument, a museum, an event, or symbol.

Wulf Kasteiner (2002) has criticized a number of historical studies focusing on memory considering that most of them aim to represent specific events within particular chronological, geographical, and media settings without reflecting on the audiences of the representations in question. As a result, the wealth of new insights into past and present historical cultures cannot be linked conclusively to specific social collectives and their historical consciousness, suggesting collective memory studies should adopt the methods of communication and media studies, especially with regard to media reception.

2.3.2. From collective memory to social and cultural memory.

Most historical studies that focus on memory use the concept collective memory, that was first coined by Halbwachs in1925 and which refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity (Olick et al. 2011). For Halbwachs studying memory was a matter of how minds work together in society, arguing that it is impossible for individuals to remember outside their group contexts: “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories…” (Halbwachs, 1992:38).

Some authors, however, have criticized the term collective memory as it could disconnect from the actual thought processes of individuals with a risk of presenting them as almost

”automatons passively obeying the interiorized collective will” (Fentress and Wickam, 1992:ix). Another problem that the term collective memory presents is that it can be over- totalizing. Those who point in this direction prefer the use of more specific terms. James

Delle (2008, 65–67) for example, defines memories in three different ways: First, public memory as an official and national narrative of a state; Second, social memory as an unauthorized memory of, for example, political parties or communities, and can differ from the public memory. And third, there is a social myth, which is a memory of events that did not happen or existed somewhere else.

Olick and Robbins (1998:112) refer to social memory studies as a rubric for inquiry into “distinct sets of mnemonic practices in various social sites” or into “the varieties of forms through which we are shaped by the past, conscious and unconscious, public and private, material and communicative, consensual and challenged”. Merrill et al. (2020:6) point out that the notion that memory can be cultural as well as communicative has not been always acknowledged. Under this notion, memory is not only conveyed via social interactions but also through cultural forms, objects and practices.

2.3.3. Remembrance in the digital media: digital archives and citizen humanities

Digital communication technologies have given rise to new forms of collectivity. The technological affordances of digital media have the potential of bringing people together around the globe and providing emplacement for collective and global memory (Özhan Koçak, 2020). Cultural memory in this context is mediated by a range of textual forms and various communication technologies. Media has the potential to carry memory across social contexts and groups, creating empathetic relations with the past and unknown others (Landsberg cited by Merril et al., 2020:6).

According to Müller (2017), digital archives have the potential to perform the dual task of involving practices of lived memory and storing archival information, preserving the past and actively engaging users as prosumers on the web who interact with the creation and sharing of the digital archives’ content. Müller (2017:12-13) suggests that digital archives are lieux de memoire, but not static and immobile as Nora would perceive them.

Digital archives become platforms where people actively engage with each other on particular stories from the past and thus transform these stories into shared and lived memories.

Hedges and Dunn (2017:129-130) have briefly discussed the relationship between academic crowdsourcing in the humanities and collective remembrance. According to these authors, crowdsourcing produces memory collectively, individually and digitally. Collective

memory is intrinsically related to conventional research in the humanities and cultural heritage, as the aim of these domains is to create, foster and preserve understanding of the shared human record. Academic crowdsourcing creates memory “beyond the moment” in different ways: Firstly, by enhancing the cultural record in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). These tasks can foster social or cultural memories of particular cultures, sections of society or entire nations. Another way crowdsourcing can create collective memory is in the online community itself. This involves the formation of narratives, shared knowledge and proficiency in undertaking the task set.

Chapter 3: Methods

This dissertation combines three different types of empirical sources in order to investigate the intersection between citizen humanities, history and social memory in online platforms.

First, a number of recent or active projects identified as citizen science initiatives connected with topics related to social memory and history were compared by identifying and defining analytical units in order to get a better understanding of citizen humanities epistemic aspects; The second empirical component involved an autonetnographic study entailing participation in one of the projects-Every name counts-for one month. This participation involved performing transcription and classification tasks daily that organically led to engagement in the online community. The third part involves the content analysis of a number of posts in the “Talk” forum of the project.

3.1. Explorative comparison

In order to get a general view of the current state of citizen science involving history and memory in online platforms, five projects were selected and analysed using analytical units partially informed by previous models, classifications and theoretical views on citizen science. This short list of projects does not aim to be comprehensive but merely explorative and serves as a means to discuss some aspects of the epistemic cultures that exist in online citizen humanities platforms where remembrance plays a central role.

The selected projects are identified as “citizen science” or “citizen humanities” in publications by the researchers involved or by appearing listed in platforms like EU- CITIZEN.SCIENCE² or Zooniverse³.

Analytical units

In order to analyse the different projects, the following analytical units were selected with the aim to identify specific information about goals, scope, participation, methodology, etc.

in the digital platforms and/or research papers about the projects (in case they existed).

2 https://eu-citizen.science/ The EU-Citizen.Science project has been funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme. EU-Citizen.Science is an online platform for sharing knowledge, tools, training and resources for citizen science

3 https://www.zooniverse.org/ is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the internet's largest and most popular citizen science projects.

These analytical units inform us about the epistemological endeavours of the different projects:

● Aim of the project: What the project hopes to achieve. The statement of intent.

● Geographical scope: If participation is local, national or international.

● Who can participate: If participation is open to everyone (within the geographical scope) with an internet connection or if participants need to have a specific profile, be able to provide some information or have a specific knowledge or skills.

● Degree of participation: What is the level of citizen involvement according to the classification proposed by Bonney et al. (2009).

● Task process type: Type of task process carried by volunteers according to Dunn and Hedges (2013) typology.

● Type(s) of data collected: Type of information gathered/created by participants.

● Aim of citizen participation: Why the citizen participation is motivated/encouraged.

● Stakeholder(s): Organization(s) involved in the project

● Communication between researchers and participants: Platform for communication between researchers and contributors.

● Communication between participants: Platform for communication between contributors.

● Benefits for citizens: Availability of data and publications and other possible direct benefits that imply reciprocity (as discussed by Hetland, 2020). This does not include more personal or indirect benefits and motivation like learning, entertainment, etc.

3.2. Netnography

Netnography is participant-observational research based in online fieldwork. It uses computer-mediated communication as a source of data to arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural or communal phenomenon (Kozinets, 2010:60). This qualitative research method adapts ethnography to the study of digital interactions. As Carlsson and Hanell (2020:47) point out, ethnography in this definition is understood more as a point of view rather than a method, since ethnography involves more than a set of procedures. The aim of the ethnographic point of view, according to Shumar and Madison (2013:266) is to achieve “a theoretical informed encounter with the other''.

Netnography is a qualitative research method that was initially applied to analyse online consumer communities and behaviours in marketing research but has been also used to support sociological research and other disciplines such as communications (Bartl et al., 2016: 166). The citizen science project Every name counts online platform meets all criteria suggested by Kozinets (2010:89) when selecting sites for netnographic research, namely that they are relevant, active, interactive, substantial, heterogeneous, and data-rich.

According to Kozinets (2015:68), netnography's participant-observational research has a dual nature that is reflected in two core qualities of online network information: that is archival and that it offers live communications, meaning that the research experience can be both asynchronous and distant but also synchronous and participative. The present study aims to take advantage of these two qualities by first, conducting a participative auto- netnography and second, analysing the content of a number of forum posts.

3.2.1 Auto-netnography

Auto-netnography is defined as “an approach to netnography that highlights the role of the netnographer’s own experiences of his or her own online experiences” (Kozinets & Kedzior, 2009, p. 8). This approach to research seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 273).

Participative observation is a procedure intimately related to auto-netnography, in which participation becomes a means to understand important aspects of social life, in this case the life of a citizen humanities contributor (Woodcock et al.:2017).

As suggested by Kozinets and Kedzior (2009:11), auto-nethnography is incorporated as part of an overall multimodal netnographic research exploration and not as a freestanding technique. For this study, the Journey Guide to auto-netnography proposed by Villegas (2018) was used as a methodological framework to explore contribution in the online citizen science project Every name counts. The first three of the six elements to consider in the process of autonetnography suggested by Villegas (2018) were used as a guide:

 The researcher’s position, role and status in the community

Auto-netnography deals with cultures, communities, symbols and interactions from a personal view. For this reason, the “self” element is important to define and situate in the

studied community. Defining this position will have an impact on the research, as interpretational and personal biases will be different depending on the researcher’s in the community.

Table 1: Possible roles and status for the researcher in the community (Based on Villegas, 2018:249)

Factor Category Summary

Type of involvement

Native The member is a natural part of the community

Immigrant The researcher at certain point, becomes a member of the community

Purpose of involvement

Opportunistic The member’s reason to be in the group is other than research (chance circumstances)

Convert The member’s reason to be in the group is the research Time of

involvement

Retrospection The member was part of the community (past experience) Contemporaneous The member is part of the community (current experience) Position in the

community

Citizen-oriented The member is a volunteer participant in the community Researcher-oriented The member is part of the hosting organization/researcher

leading the project

According to the classification of the roles and status of researcher suggested by Villegas (Table 1), I was an “immigrant” and “convert” in Every name counts, as I found the project and started contributing because of researching purposes, acquiring familiarity during the netnographic process. The reporting during the research can be considered contemporaneous, as it was studied at the same time the experience was lived and the introspection was done in those terms. Villegas (2018:248), following Arnould and Wallendorf (1993) differentiates between user-oriented ethnography and marketeer- oriented ethnography but in the case of a citizen science project we could instead make a distinction between citizen-oriented versus researcher-oriented auto-netnography (here, researcher refers to the researcher hosting the citizen science project). I participated in Every name counts as a contributor, making the auto-netnography citizen-oriented.

 Choosing an auto-ethnographic approach

Auto-ethnography is used in this study as an explorative tool and not as a freestanding method. For this reason the highly introspective autobiographical text was not the final product (as suggested by Ellis et al., 2011). I recorded my experiences as a contributor in Every name counts in a journal, trying to find a balance between evocation and analysis but finally using the produced text as a tool inside a broader netnographic approach.

 Time, data and sampling

The time period for the autonetnography was about a month. The source of data was the reflexive field notes taken on a nearly daily basis during this time, including both text and image captures of the process. As the autoethnography was carried for a short time, sampling was not needed. It was possible to analyse the entire set of data from the journal.

The autonetnographic process also served indirectly as a means to naturally observe different settings as proposed by Cohen et al. (2011:457):

● The physical setting: While Cohen et al. refer to the organization of the physical space, participatory observation served in this case a way to become familiar with the organization of the website from a heuristic approach.

● The human setting: How groups are organized, their composition, the actions and behaviour of individuals and how they change over time.

● The interactional setting: The formal and informal interactions that take place.

● The programme setting: Activities that take place there

3.2.2 Forum content analysis

The second part of the netnographic research was conducted following a non-participatory approach, involving the passive observation and interpretation of archival online material:

discussion threads from the project Every names counts forum. This forum is divided in four sections:

● Announcements, with updates about the progress on the project, future steps, and related topics. It only has 16 discussion threads and 5 participants, as this section is aimed for researchers to inform about the state of the project.

● Introduce yourself, a space for everyone involved to introduce themselves and get to know each other. It has more than 100 threads.

● Troubleshooting, a section with general practical information about the workflows and a space to ask and give answers about tasks work in general, not about individual tasks. There are more than 300 discussion threads in this section.

● Notes. This section is different from the other as it does not function as an ordinary forum thread. When adding hashtags (sometimes required by the task) or a comment about an individual task, it gets automatically posted here together with

the image of the digitized document that is being transcribed. Other volunteers have the possibility to answer specific doubts, add more hashtags or further comments.

There are more than 34.000 discussion threads in this section and more than 1800 participants. Most of these posts have only a hashtag, as in some cases adding them is part of the task, but there are also cases where the comments are about doubts or findings and additional information about the subjects in the documents.

While it was possible to go through all the threads in the Announcements, Troubleshooting and Introduce yourself sections, sampling was needed in the Talk section.

This sampling was partly purposive, as fifty threads were selected by the criteria of having two or more comments and avoiding those that contained only hashtags.

For Kozinets (2015:95), netnography cannot remain personal when only downloading, coding, analysing and reporting publicly available data. This view is also shared by Phillips (2011:481) who considers that becoming a member of the online fan culture he was studying was a necessary process to obtain rich data for his research. While this part of the netnography was observational, previous participation allowed a more immersive and situated experience than an exclusively passive and only archival-based study.

All data were analysed following an inductive-reiterative approach. The comparative exploration of different citizen humanities projects and the participatory observation during the autoethnographic study contextualized the data from the forum threads, but some ideas and concepts rooted in the data from the forum served to reconsider some topics not deeply explored when analysing the first two empirical sources. The analytical and interpretative process was therefore characterized by its fluidity and by its reiterative character. The coding of the data was done following mainly an inductive approach, letting common elements appear during the process. However, this process was not purely inductive, as I had a particular interest in finding manifestations of remembrance and exchanges that could inform of the epistemic culture of the community.

3.4 . Ethical considerations

Both the participative autonetnography and the non-participative observation of the forum were done covertly. In the case of the forum observation, there was no intervention or interaction with the posters. The conversations of this forum are accessible without password, making this part of the study completely unobtrusive, using archival material.

According to Kozinets (2009:141), when the researcher participates over time with forum members and/or conducts interviews online, this is clearly human subject research, and disclosure and informed consent is needed. However, in the case of the autonetnography carried in this dissertation, the observations were focused on my own participation, and while there were occasional exchanges with other participants, these were limited to the project’s tasks. While the information obtained during the netnographic process was not sensitive or highly private, nicknames, handles and direct quotes from the forum were nevertheless avoided in order to safeguard the integrity of the posters. All the procedures carried during the research process as well as possible bias and issues have been fully disclosed in the text in order to offer full transparency.

Chapter 4: Results

4.1. Explorative comparison: The context of knowledge co-production in memory-focused citizen science projects

In this section, the results from the explorative comparison of the projects Every name counts, Memorias de trazer por casa, Topoteque, E-xiliad@s and Historic graves are presented. The results of the comparison between the five projects are synthetized in Table 2.

4.1.1. The role of memory as presented by the organizers

All five projects have in common the aim of recovering, saving and sharing memories that otherwise would be lost or kept for few. Every name counts, E-xiliad@s and Historic graves aim to help people to find information about family members and their memories, while the last one, together with Topoteque puts also emphasis in reinforcing the local history.

Memórias de trazer por casa is a very short project that is not active longer but it is still announced in the European Union citizen science website⁴. The aim of this project is to encourage citizens to share memories in social media using objects as a starting point. These projects are presented with introductory slogans or “about us” sections using terms and concepts related to remembrance and memory:

● Topoteque has the following slogans in their homepage:”Topoteque. Our memories”,

“ Keeping our history in remembrance, together” “The local history platform for citizen science”⁵

● The name of the projects Memórias de trazer por casa contains a Portuguese idiom and could be loosely translated as “Homeware memories” or “Memories to stay at home” .The project (that was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic first wave) is introduced in the website with the following text:

Since we are at home, we will tell our memories. Let’s take the opportunity to share stories and memories with the youngest and the oldest. All stories count! This week, share stories of important objects in yours and your family’s life⁶.

4 https://eu-citizen.science/project/50#

5 https://www.topothek.at/en/

6 https://memoriaparatodos.pt/portfolio/memorias-de-trazer-por-casa/

Table 2: Explorative comparison of five citizen humanities projects by analytical units

“Every name

counts” “Memorias

de trazer por casa”

“Topoteque” “E-xiliad@s” “Historic graves”

Aim of the

Project To make all the names of nazi concentration camps’ prisioners that appear in the

documents in the Arolsen Archives searchable in their online archive, so people can easily access information on the fate of their relatives

To share stories and memories from home using personal objects as an starting point

To save historical material that is in private hands and make it accessible to everyone

To collect online information on the Spanish republican exile during the period from 1936-39 to the first stages of Franco’s regime.

To create a bottom- up online

multimedia national resource, through community-led archaeological graveyard surveys

Geographical scope

International National

(Portugal) International (Topoteque in each country)

International National (Ireland)

Who can

participate Open Open Open (for those

who belong to a subscribed community)

Specific: exiliates or exiliate’s friends and relatives and researchers.

Open (for those who belong to a

subscribed community) Degree of

participation

Contributory Contributory Contributory Contributory Collaborative Task process -Transcribing

-Cataloguing -Contextualising

Recording/

creating content -Contextualising -Mapping -Recording/

creating content

Recording/creating

content -Transcribing

-Georeferencing -Mapping -Recording/

creating content Type of data

collected/

outputs

-Transcribed data

-Metadata -Images

-Written stories. -Images -Metadata -Geospatial

Primary historical

data -Transcribed data

-Image -Oral stories -Geospatial Aim of citizen

participation

Great volume of documentation that needs to be

transcribed

Raising awareness of the contribution of memory and heritage to social and territorial development and cohesion

Create a platform for community history

To collect unpublished primary data

-Strong local communities in Ireland

-Great volume of material to transcribe -Low-cost training -Grassroots project from its origin Stakeholder(s) -The Arolsen Archives

-Zooniverse

Memoria para todos (citizen science training and research program)

-EU (LEADER project) -Municipalities -ICARUS -(Others)

-Ministry of Employment and Social Security -Dirección General de Migraciones

-EU (LEADER) -Local development partnerships -County archaeologist -Local authorities Communication

researchers- participants

Forum/Direct

message Social media Comment form Email Email/Contact form

Communication between participants

Forum/Direct

message Social media Comment form Bulletin board Internal

Benefits for citizens

-Access to data/

online archive -Credits for students -Historical assesment

(Unclear) -Open access to data

-Open access to

data -Open access to data -Historical

assessment

-Open access to data -Enriching local history

● In the project e-xiliad@s participants are asked to “tell their story” and share their own or their relative’s memories in the introductory text:

Would you like to participate in our project by sharing with us your memories of the exile? If you are an exiled one or you have contacts of any kind (as former refugee, progeny of exiled or friend) with the exile, we are interested in your experience.⁷

● As mentioned in the introduction chapter, The Every Name Counts project introductory text suggests that it “provides a simple way for anyone to take part in active remembrance without leaving the house”⁸.

● The topic of remembrance is not directly addressed in the introduction or “about “ section in Historic Graves platform⁹. The emphasis is put on the methods used and in the fact that it is a grassroots/community-based project. However, the main researcher behind the project (Toscano, 2019) considers that ”Historic Graves project has proved to be a valuable genealogical and touristic asset, allowing people interested in tracing their family history to locate their headstones to individual graveyards” and refers to the project as “community archaeology focused on graveyards as living heritage”.

4.1.2. Comparing knowledge co-production processes in memory-focused citizen humanities

All projects but one are contributory, meaning that a priori, members of the public primarily contribute collecting data. Historic Graves is the exception, being a collaborative project. In this case, citizens help also to the refinement of the project design, as the communities adapt the archaeological method to their local cemeteries during fieldwork and also analyse data and disseminate findings by instantly publishing results of the fieldwork and transcriptions of the graves online (Toscano, 2019 and Bocanegra et al. 2017). Historic Graves is also the only project that has an on-site field component and is not entirely digital- based as participants are required to survey their local graveyards.

The projects Every name counts and Memorias de trazer por casa are open to everyone and can be done from home. Topoteque and Historic Graves require that local

7 https://www.exiliadosrepublicanos.info/en/project

8 https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/arolsen-archives/every-name-counts/about/research 9 https://historicgraves.com/content/about-us

institutions or communities are inscribed to the project for citizens to be able to participate in them. E-xiliad@s is a special case in the sense that only people who are close to Spanish Republican exiles or have some information about them can participate. The participation normally entails filling a web form with questions, text forms and closed lists to “stimulate the family memory” (Bocanegra, 2020). Even though there are possibilities for the participants to start conversations in the bulletin board or on social media, there is not a reiterative process of knowledge production .

E-xiliad@s, Memorias de trazer por casa and partially Historic Graves (as the recording of oral stories is also part of the project) require participants to record their own memories. In the case of E-xiliad@s, these memories are considered primary historical data.

In a feature in Topoteque locals are asked to identify unknown people and other information in photographs. Every name counts is the only project of the five that does not require any kind of personal involvement with the materials, as participants are asked to categorize and transcribe digitized documents.

When comparing the aim of citizen participation of the five projects we could argue that Every name counts and E-xiliad@s have the most purely pragmatic aim. It is impossible for the researchers in the Arolsen Archives to transcribe the huge amount of documents in order to make them searchable and in the case of E-xiliad@s, collecting non published historical primary data is the main reason to create the digital platform and ask for voluntary participants. The other three projects seem to have the participatory contribution as a goal on its own, or at least as one of their main goals.

As mentioned previously, Historic Graves is the only project of the five that requires participants to work in the field, interacting with each other outside of the digital environment. This implies that a great part of the epistemic process is similar to the one followed by traditional archaeology. However, the online interaction and instant publication of the generated data in the web-platform creates a “digital ecosystem for community science” (Toscano, 2019). The process followed in Memorias de trazer por casa consists of sharing a picture of some object and writing a text about it including details about its ownership, history, memories attached to it, etc. After being shared on Facebook or Instagram, the pictures and texts are also published in the project’s website¹⁰. In this case

10 https://memoriaparatodos.pt/portfolio/memorias-de-trazer-por-casa/

the process is not reiterative at all and it does not differ significantly from the common use of hashtags in social media that leads to movements in a more organic way. In this project and in e-xiliad@s the only task is, according to Dunn and Gedges classification (2013), create content, but in a similar way to how respondents and informants in non-participative research provide data to researchers. The tasks in the other projects-transcribing, contextualising, mapping, etc.-while less creative and less attached to personal memories create the possibility for the citizens to approach the study objects from a more analytical point of view.

4.1.3 The question of reciprocity

It is out of the scope of this dissertation to understand all the benefits that motivates participation in citizen humanities projects. All projects had in common that the data generated during the co-production process are available online in the short term. In Every Name Counts, the entered data will eventually be part of the Arolsen Online Archive¹¹. The Zooniverse platform-that hosts Every name counts among many other citizen science projects-allows participants to “collect” the transcribed documents in their account, allowing the users to revisit documents of interest. It is also possible to create different collections of documents allowing the users to organize material according to their interest.

The project e-xiliad@s offers in their website the publication of the information received in related sections (with prior consent) historical advice via email, bulletin board dissemination of information through project social media and creation of informative sections about exile (Bocanegra, 2020). Historic Graves’ website allows visitors from Ireland and across the globe to freely explore and search the growing database of multimedia records and stories (Toscano, 2019). In Memórias de trazer por casa all the posts with pictures and stories are compiled and published on the project’s website. In Topoteque, the objects that are digitized become part of a digital archive that everyone can access online. However, it is important to notice that these benefits are not exclusive to participants, as everyone can access the data generated in the citizen humanities projects.

11 https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/search/

4.2. Autonetnography in Every name counts

In this section, I present the results from the autonethnographic study as a participant in the project Every name counts. To keep the results relevant to the aim of the study and research questions, they are organized around the following themes: tasks, community and individual learning and remembrance.

Fig.1 An example of a prisoner card with the different fields that volunteers have to identify and transcribe

4.2.1. About the tasks

The participants are asked to enter data from two different prisoner card index: The Dachau Central Card Index and a separate index of Jewish prisoners from Hungary who arrived at the camp. While the name, date of birth and prisoner number have already been indexed in an earlier workflow, the participants are now asked to introduce fields like: prisoner category, location in an external labour sub-camp, block number, transfer date to another camp, date of entry to Dachau, date of death, etc. (Fig.1) While the task seems pretty simple and straightforward, it can be challenging in the beginning for different reasons: first

of all the information is in German language, and while knowing German is not needed to complete the tasks, been familiar with the language could be helpful to learn faster how to navigate the tasks; second, to classify the information in the card requires some practise, as it is not always clear which the dates or names belong to a category and third, the handwriting can be very difficult to transcribe. The tutorial and helping materials provided are useful but most learning is done by task repetition and with the help of other users in the Talk forum. In general, completing a task requires 3-5 minutes so it is very easy for me to find the time to complete at least a couple of them every day.

4.2.2. Getting help from the online community

I decided to ask for help in the forum for the first time when I could not decipher the name of the Dachau subcamp where a prisoner was sent. This detail is handwritten and the helping materials offered by the platform were not very helpful. In a couple of hours a user (that I will call “A”) answered with the correct transcription: “Neuaubing”, something completely illegible in the handwritten text. Another volunteer “B” joins the conversation and gives me some tips to find information about subcamps when they are not easily legible. Not being able to transcribe the subcamp details and not finding help in the materials provided by the project becomes a recurrent problem for me, so I ask for help again in the forum. “A” answers again, this time with a list with the subcamps they have encountered most often. This list is very helpful for me, and I always consult it when I have to transcribe this detail and always find the answer in it. Users “A” and “B” have answered most of my questions in the forum. They seem to go systematically through all the questions and try to answer them almost every day. This is a task that requires a lot of time and dedication as well as experience and expertise with transcribing and seeking archival information.

To help with the transcription of the prisoner category, the interface offers a link to a pdf file with a list with prisoner categories and their abbreviations. I cannot find what D.R.

means in this list, so I ask in the forum and the user “C” answers in less than an hour that it means Deutsches Reich=Germany. In addition this volunteer explains that D.R. in this context includes Austria after 1938 and refers to the “non-citizen subject status” for Jews in Germany after 1935. This is an example of how some volunteers not only help to solve a

task but give valuable historical information contextualising the task, making it more interesting and meaningful.

After some days contributing I learn from the community to retrieve other documents linked to the prisoners from the Arolsen digital archive as a helpful resource to obtain information when it is unclear in the cards. After a week, I get asked for help for the first time by a new user. It is surprising for me that I am already able to help and to give tips to others after such a short time as a contributor. It seems that the “newbie” status does not last for a long time in this platform if one actively contributes.

Around the end of the period of observation a member of the research team answers one of my doubts (this is the only time this happens). Normally the cards include the date of birth of the prisoner, date of entry to the camp, date of transfer and/or date of death. But in one card I find two dates of entry. The researcher explained to me briefly that sometimes prisoners could be transferred in and out of the same camp several times and suggested that I enter both dates in the same field. A week later user “B” answers with very detailed information they have found in another document in the Arolsen archive. They have found in the transportation list to the camp that the subject in the card arrived together with another 12.000 (!) prisoners on 09/10/1944 but that no information about a second arrival exists. I try to find this list myself in the Arolsen online archive by prisoner number but it is not an easy task and I finally ask “B” to provide me with an URL. I am again impressed with how much time and information seeking skills “B” puts on this project, not only completing their own tasks but also double-checking other users' tasks and finding additional information that it is not specifically required to complete the workflows.

4.2.3. Learning and remembrance: a personal experience

It was clear from the beginning that while useful, the tutorials and helping materials offered by the project were not enough for me to be able to complete the tasks. Especially in the beginning, until the terms started to be recurrent I needed to translate some German terms and words using Google Translator. The names of cities of birth, last address and locations were also googled often, as many of them were completely unknown for me, sometimes unrecognizable due to being handwritten, written in German or simply being small villages that I have never heard of. It was common for me to look for these places in Google Maps and end up browsing to check how they looked. Looking at pictures of places I have never