![Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Introduction 5
Models for Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage
The issues facing contemporary crowdsourcing projects are not new. Accepting
contributionsfrommembersofthepublicforinclusionincollectionsdocumentation
and other informatics systems has always raised issues about how to validate those
contributions. Nineteenth-century natural historians corresponding with amateur
observers about the distribution of botanical specimens had to try to determine
the veracity and credibility of their contributions,16
just as modern manuscript
transcription projects such as Transcribe Bentham (Chapter 3) initially questioned
the editorial quality of volunteer-produced transcripts. The Smithsonian Institution
has a long history17
with ‘proto-crowdsourcing’, as does the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED), whose editor launched in 1879 an ‘Appeal to the English-
speaking and English-reading public’ to help provide evidence for the history and
usage of words to complete the dictionary.18
Many chapters relate crowdsourcing
to long traditions of volunteer augmentations of GLAM collections (see for
example Chapter 6). Technology has enabled crowdsourcing as we know it, but
models for public participation in collection, research and observation pre-date it.
The ability of digital technologies to provide almost instantaneous data gathering
and feedback, computationally validate contributions and the ability to reach both
broad and niche groups through loose networks have all been particularly important
in the modern era. As some chapters explicate, the ability to track data provenance
computationally and verify remediated primary sources is particularly important
for scholarly projects. Digitisation has also helped manage the limitations of
physical space, conservation, location and opening hours that previously affected
access to collections.19
UNESCO’s definition of ‘cultural heritage’ as ‘the legacy of physical artefacts
and intangible attributes […] inherited from past generations’ provides a broad
outline for this book.20
Cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects have followed a
variety of models, including ‘commons-based peer-production’ and participatory
archives (see Chapters 4 and 9). The National Library of Australia’s Trove21
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) correction project (and Rose Holley’s
excellent articles on its genesis, process and results)22
has been hugely influential.
16 Secord, ‘Corresponding Interests’.
17 For examples, see Millikan, ‘Joseph Henry’ and Bruno, ‘Smithsonian
Crowdsourcing since 1849!’.
18 Gilliver, ‘“Your Dictionary Needs You”’. The original text of the 1879 appeal
is available at http://public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/archived-documents/april-1879-
appeal/april-1879-appeal/.
19 Ridge, ‘From Tagging to Theorizing’.
20 UNESCO Office in Cairo, ‘Tangible Cultural Heritage’.
21 http://trove.nla.gov.au/.
22 See for example Holley, Many Hands Make Light Work and Holley,
‘Crowdsourcing’.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2484655-250623061325-322f85e4/85/Crowdsourcing-Our-Cultural-Heritage-Mia-Ridge-32-320.jpg)
![Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn 19
negative comments are displayed on an exhibition’s web presence. As staff receive
weekly digests about the visitor experience, they can quickly discover what worked
and did not within any given show. Staff have been able to adapt and change the
visitor experience on the fly based on some of the feedback received, but with larger
issues, staff consider how to adjust future shows to improve those experiences. The
comment books present the institution with a full cycle of participation and learning,
allowing our visitors to participate in feedback and honouring that participation by
showing it to other visitors and our staff to gain greater understanding of what each
person experiences when he or she comes to the Museum.
Theseearlyinitiativesincrowdsourcinghaveallowedouraudiencetoparticipate
while the institution gained considerable insight into its holdings and audience,
but both examples fell short of a truly meaningful exchange. Visitor interactions
with objects on our website were never connected to their in-person visitation and,
though they could participate, there was no way to have a meaningful dialogue.
Community members could establish profiles and, as a result, there was a life to
their presence online, but it was fairly limited in scope. Staff could respond to
comments left in the electronic comment books, but visitors were not notified if
their questions had been answered or, more importantly, that their feedback had
made a difference. As we continue to move forward with these two initiatives we
are developing ways to bridge the online and in-person visitor gap.
In the meantime, we have also looked to create more specific projects which
would allow visitor interaction with the institution to become all the more
meaningful and create a deeper sense of engagement.
Crowdsourcing as Exhibition
In 2008, the Museum embarked on Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, a
photography installation that invited the general public to participate in the
exhibition design process. The project took its inspiration from the critically
acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and
financial columnist James Surowiecki asserted that a diverse crowd is often wiser
at making decisions than expert individuals. Click! explored whether Surowiecki’s
premise could be applied to the visual arts.
In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that maintaining diversity
and independence are two key factors for a crowd to be wise. Both issues are
discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3 of the book:
Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be
absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive
characteristics of group decision making.
Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First,
it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2484655-250623061325-322f85e4/85/Crowdsourcing-Our-Cultural-Heritage-Mia-Ridge-46-320.jpg)
![This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: Principles of Political Economy
Author: Arthur Latham Perry
Release date: January 28, 2013 [eBook #41936]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by Colin Bell, JoAnn Greenwood, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously
made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://archive.org/details/americana)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRINCIPLES OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY ***](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2484655-250623061325-322f85e4/85/Crowdsourcing-Our-Cultural-Heritage-Mia-Ridge-60-320.jpg)
![named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of
silver, current money with the merchant. We may notice here, that
there were then merchants as a class, that silver by weight passed
as money from hand to hand, and that in the lack of written deeds
to land, as we have them, sales were made sure before the faces
of living men, who would tell the truth and pass on the word.
Abraham indeed seems to have given the pitch for the song of trade
sung by his descendants, the Jews, from that day to this; for Jacob,
his grandson, was a skilled trafficker, not to say a secret trickster, in
his bargains; and wherever in the Old World or the New the Jews
have been, there have been in fact and in fame busy buyers and
sellers.
But the Jews have had no special privileges in the realm of trade; on
the contrary, they have always been under special disabilities both
legal and social. Even in England, the most liberal country in Europe,
they were exiled for long periods, maltreated at all points of contact
with other people, more or less put under the ban of the Common
and the Statute law, often outrageously taxed on their goods and
persons, and studiously kept out of the paths of highest public
employment even down to a time within the memory of living men.
[1] Yet so natural is the impulse to trade, so universally diffused, so
imperative also if progress is in any direction to be attained, that the
English and all other peoples were as glad to borrow money, that is,
buy the use of it, of the persecuted Jews, as the latter were to get
money by buying and selling other things, and then to loan it, that
is, sell the use of it, under the best securities (never very good) for
its return with interest, that they could obtain. Happily, the mutual
gains that always wait on the Exchanges even when their conditions
are curtailed, of course attended the mutilated exchanges between
Jews and Christians: otherwise, they would not continue to take
place.
Christianity, however, as the perfected Judaism, gradually brought in
the better conditions, the higher impulses, and the more certain
rewards, of Trade, all which, we may be sure, were designed in the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2484655-250623061325-322f85e4/85/Crowdsourcing-Our-Cultural-Heritage-Mia-Ridge-78-320.jpg)
Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage Mia Ridge
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- 6. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage
- 7. Digital Research inthe Arts and Humanities Series Editors Marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes, Andrew Prescott and Harold Short Digital technologies are becoming increasingly important to arts and humanities research, expanding the horizons of research methods in all aspects of data capture, investigation, analysis, modelling, presentation and dissemination. This important series will cover a wide range of disciplines with each volume focusing on a particular area, identifying the ways in which technology impacts on specific subjects. The aim is to provide an authoritative reflection of the ‘state of the art’ in the application of computing and technology. The series will be critical reading for experts in digital humanities and technology issues, and it will also be of wide interest to all scholars working in humanities and arts research. Other titles in the series Digital Archetypes Adaptations of Early Temple Architecture in South and Southeast Asia Sambit Datta and David Beynon ISBN 978 1 4094 7064 9 Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage Edited by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker ISBN 978 0 7546 7583 9 Art Practice in a Digital Culture Edited by Hazel Gardiner and Charlie Gere ISBN 978 0 7546 7623 2 Digital Research in the Study of Classical Antiquity Edited by Gabriel Bodard and Simon Mahony ISBN 978 0 7546 7773 4
- 8. Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage Editedby Mia Ridge Open University, UK
- 9. V Printed in theUnited Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD © Mia Ridge 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Mia Ridge has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Ridge, Mia. Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage / by Mia Ridge. pages cm. – (Digital research in the arts and humanities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1022-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4724-1023-8 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4724-1024-5 (epub) 1. Cultural property–Management. 2. Cultural property–Philosophy. 3. Human computation. 4. Digital media–Social aspects. 5. Museums–Collection management. 6. Collection management (Libraries) 7. Library materials–Digitization. 8. Archival materials–Digitization. I. Title. CC135.R53 2014 363.6'90681–dc23 2014011137 ISBN 9781472410221 (hbk) ISBN 9781472410238 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472410245 (ebk – ePUB)
- 10. Contents List of Figures vii List of Tables xi List of Abbreviations xiii Notes on Contributors xv Series Preface xxi Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage: Introduction 1 Mia Ridge Part I: Case Studies 1 Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn 17 Shelley Bernstein 2 Old Weather: Approaching Collections from a Different Angle 45 Lucinda Blaser 3 ‘Many Hands Make Light Work. Many Hands Together Make Merry Work’: Transcribe Bentham and Crowdsourcing Manuscript Collections 57 Tim Causer and Melissa Terras 4 Build, Analyse and Generalise: Community Transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the Development of Scripto 89 Sharon M. Leon 5 What’s on the Menu?: Crowdsourcing at the New York Public Library 113 Michael Lascarides and Ben Vershbow 6 What’s Welsh for ‘Crowdsourcing’? Citizen Science and Community Engagement at the National Library of Wales 139 Lyn Lewis Dafis, Lorna M. Hughes and Rhian James 7 Waisda?: Making Videos Findable through Crowdsourced Annotations 161 Johan Oomen, Riste Gligorov and Michiel Hildebrand
- 11. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage vi 8 Your Paintings Tagger: Crowdsourcing Descriptive Metadata for a National Virtual Collection 185 Kathryn Eccles and Andrew Greg Part II: Challenges and Opportunities of Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing 9 Crowding Out the Archivist? Locating Crowdsourcing within the Broader Landscape of Participatory Archives 211 Alexandra Eveleigh 10 How the Crowd Can Surprise Us: Humanities Crowdsourcing and the Creation of Knowledge 231 Stuart Dunn and Mark Hedges 11 The Role of Open Authority in a Collaborative Web 247 Lori Byrd Phillips 12 Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organisations 269 Trevor Owens Index 281
- 12. 1.1 The onlineevaluation tool used for Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition allowed participants to view images and rate them on a sliding scale. Screenshot: Brooklyn Museum Website 22 1.2 Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition was installed in the Brooklyn Museum from 27 June to 10 August 2008. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 24 1.3 The online evaluation tool designed for Split Second: Indian Paintings displayed two objects side by side and asked participants to select as quickly as possible which painting they preferred from the pair. Screenshot: Brooklyn Museum Website 26 1.4 Split Second: Indian Paintings culminated in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum which ran from 13 July 2011 to 1 January 1 2012. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 27 1.5 1,708 artists throughout Brooklyn registered to open their studios for GO. Map: Brooklyn Museum 32 1.6 GO neighbourhood coordinators worked throughout the project at the local level to connect artists, voters and volunteers, often through meetups held at small venues. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 34 1.7 Every participating GO artist was assigned a unique number; voters would visit studios and use this number to log their visit by text message, through the GO app, or by writing it down and later entering it on the GO website. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 35 1.8 During the open studio weekend, approximately 18,000 people logged 147,000 studio visits to artists throughout Brooklyn. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 36 1.9 GO: a community-curated open studio project opened at the Brooklyn Museum on 1 December 2012 and ran through 24 February 2013. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum 39 3.1 The Transcribe Bentham ‘Transcription Desk’ platform 62 3.2 The Transcribe Bentham transcription interface, and transcription toolbar 64 3.3 Transcribe Bentham results, 8 September 2010 to 19 July 2013 66 3.4 Upgraded Transcription Desk in ‘maximised’ mode, showing rotated image, transcription toolbar and tabbed transcription interface 69 List of Figures
- 13. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage viii 3.5 Upgraded Transcription Desk in ‘maximised’ mode, showing rotated image and preview of encoded transcript 70 3.6 Manuscript JB/050/135/001, courtesy UCL Library Special Collections. Image taken by UCL Creative Media Services 78 3.7 Time spent checking submitted transcripts, in seconds, 1 October 2012 to 19 July 2013 79 3.8 Changes made to text and mark-up of submitted transcripts, 1 October 2012 to 19 July 2013 82 4.1 Papers of the War Department, 1784–1800 website 90 4.2 PWD transcription interface 99 4.3 Total registered users and documents complete in comparison to active transcribers over 90 days 101 4.4 Number of edits from the most active users 102 4.5 Reasons for requesting a transcription account 103 4.6 Word frequency within stated transcriber interests 104 4.7 Scripto architecture schema 106 4.8 Scripto website 108 4.9 DIY History website 109 5.1 The user interface for the NYPL’s Map Warper (http://maps.nypl.org/warper) 116 5.2 Early prototype of the What’s on the Menu? transcription interface 120 5.3 Revised beta version of What’s on the Menu? transcription interface as it appeared at launch 121 5.4 What’s on the Menu? home page, two and a half weeks after launch 124 5.5 Graph of site visits over time. Source: NYPL 125 5.6 The redesigned What’s on the Menu? home page 127 5.7 The redesigned What’s on the Menu? dish detail page, showing visualisation tools 128 5.8 One of the only incidents of intentional vandalism we could find in the first six months; it is a fairly highbrow one, at that 133 6.1 The home page of Cymru1900Wales 147 6.2 Walter Sheppard on a camel in Cairo, c. 1917 150 6.3a Part of will of David ap John ap John, 1609, St Asaph Probate Records, SA1609–96. Source: NLW 154 6.3b Part of will of John Scurlock, Waungaled, Abergwili, Carmarthen, 1851, St David’s Probate Records, SD1851–276. Source: NLW 155
- 14. List of Figuresix 7.1 Digital content life cycle and crowdsourcing (adopted from the Make it Digital Guides, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence) 164 7.2 Home page 171 7.3 Game interface 172 7.4 Game recap 172 8.1 Comparison of motivations of Galaxy Zoo and Your Paintings Tagger volunteers 198 8.2 Comparison of motivations of Galaxy Zoo and Your Paintings Tagger volunteers (percentage of taggers and their motivations) 199 8.3 Responses to whether the ‘option for discussions with other taggers about the project’ would be likely to encourage more people to tag more paintings 201 8.4 Your Paintings Tagger achievement levels and productivity as of 17 June 2013 204 8.5 H. Quinton, The 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards on the way to the Crimea 1854, oil on canvas, 1869, The Military Museum of the Dragoon Guards 205 9.1 A user participation matrix 217
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- 16. 3.1 Number ofmanuscripts worked on by volunteers, 8 September 2010 to 19 July 2013 73 3.2 Contributions of Transcribe Bentham’s Super Transcribers, 8 September 2010 to 19 July 2013 74 3.3 Time spent on quality control process, 8 September 2010 to 19 July 2013 76 3.4 Summary of quality control process, 1 October 2012 to 19 July 2013 77 3.5 Editorial intervention in manuscripts submitted between 1 October 2012 and 19 July 2013 81 3.6 Quality control of submitted transcripts, 1 October 2012 to 19 July 2013 83 6.1 Models of crowdsourcing projects in libraries, archives and museums, based on work by Oomen and Aroyo 145 7.1 Classification of crowdsourcing initiatives 163 7.2 Waisda? tag distribution over GTAA facets and Cornetto synset types 176 8.1 Summary of tagging tasks and properties 194 8.2 Compared motivations of Galaxy Zoo and Your Paintings Tagger volunteers 197 8.3 Your Paintings Tagger achievement levels and productivity as of 17 June 2013 203 10.1 Categories of humanities crowdsourcing processes 239 List of Tables
- 17. This page hasbeen left blank intentionally
- 18. List of Abbreviations AHRC UK Arts and Humanities Research Council APIs Application programming interfaces ARA Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland) BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CDWA Categories for the Description of Works of Art DEP Data Enhancement Programme GLAMs Galleries, libraries, archives and museums GTAA Dutch acronym of the Common ThesaurusAudiovisualArchives HTR Handwritten Text Recognition JISC Formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee, now Jisc. KRO KatholiekeRadioOmroep,Dutchpublicbroadcastingorganisation MBH Man Bijt Hond (in English, Man Bites Dog), Dutch television show NAGPRA NativeAmerican Graves Protection and RepatriationAct of 1990 NCRV Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging, Dutch broadcaster NEH-ODH US National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities NHPRC US National Archives and Records Administration’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission NIRP Scottish National Inventory Research Project NLW National Library of Wales NYPL New York Public Library OED Oxford English Dictionary OCR Optical Character Recognition PCF Public Catalogue Foundation PWD The Papers of the War Department, 1784–1800 RRCHNM Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media RRN Reciprocal Research Network TEI Text Encoding Initiative UCL University College London UGC User-generated content ULAN Union List of Artists’ Names ULCC University of London Computer Centre VA Victoria and Albert Museum XML Extensible Mark-up Language YPT Your Paintings Tagger
- 19. This page hasbeen left blank intentionally
- 20. Notes on Contributors Aboutthe Editor: Mia Ridge is researching a PhD in the Department of History at the Open University, United Kingdom, investigating effective designs for participatory digital history and exploring historians’ use, evaluation of and contributions to scholarly crowdsourcing projects. She has published and presented widely on various topics including user experience research and design for cultural heritage. Mia has led workshops teaching design for crowdsourcing in cultural heritage and academia for groups such as the British Library’s Digital Scholarship programme and the Digital Humanities 2013 conference. Formerly Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum Group (UK), Mia has worked internationally as a business analyst, digital consultant and web programmer in the cultural heritage and commercial sectors, including roles at Museum Victoria (Australia) and the Museum of London. She is Chair of the Museums Computer Group (MCG), a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and serves on several museum and digital humanities conference programme committees and project steering groups. Mia has post-graduate qualifications in software development (RMITUniversity, 2001) and an MSc in Human-Centred Systems (City University, London, 2011). The museum crowdsourcing games Mia designed, built and evaluated for her MSc dissertation project were nominated as a case study of ‘outstanding digital practice in the heritage sector in the UK and internationally’ by the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). About the Contributors: Shelley Bernstein is the Vice Director of Digital Engagement Technology at the Brooklyn Museum where she works to further the Museum’s community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, web-enabled comment books, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online. She is the initiator and community manager of the Museum’s initiatives on the social web. She organised Click!, a crowd-curated exhibition, Split Second: Indian Paintings, and GO: a community-curated open studio project. In 2010, Shelley was named one of the 40 Under 40 in Crain’s New York Business and she has been featured in the New York Times. She can be found biking to work or driving her 1974 VW Super Beetle in Red Hook, Brooklyn with her dog Teddy.
- 21. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage xvi Lucinda Blaser is a Digital Project Manager at Royal Museums Greenwich. For the past five years she has led the Museum’s digitisation programme and worked on a variety of projects to enhance creatively the Museum’s collection. Lucinda has represented the Museum in its work in citizen science and crowdsourcing projects which range from participation in Old Weather to the transcription of 1915 Merchant Navy crew lists. Lori Byrd Phillips is the Digital Marketing Content Coordinator at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Lori holds a Masters in Museum Studies from Indiana University and a BA in History from George Mason University. She is a leader in the GLAM-Wiki initiative, an international group of volunteer Wikipedians who help cultural institutions share resources through collaborations with Wikipedia. In 2012 she served as the US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation and established the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium, a network of institutions and individuals that support one another in the pursuit of Wikipedia projects in the cultural sector. Tim Causer is a Research Associate at the Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws at University College London (UCL). He joined the Bentham Project in October 2010, and is responsible for the coordination and day-to-day running of Transcribe Bentham, the award-winning collaborative transcription initiative. Tim is a historian of convict transportation, and carried out his PhD research on the infamous Norfolk Island penal settlement (1825–55) at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, which was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award. He is currently writing up this research for publication in articles and, ultimately, a book. In 2010, Tim gave a keynote lecture on his work at the Professional Historians’ Association (NSW)’s 25th anniversary conference at Norfolk Island. He also holds an undergraduate MA and MLitt in history from the University of Aberdeen. He also acts as editor of the Journal of Bentham Studies, Associate Editor of Australian Studies (formerly the journal of the British Australian Studies Association) and was a member of the advisory board for the ‘Digital Communities’ category of the 2012 and 2013 Prix Ars Electronica. Lyn Lewis Dafis is Head of digitisation, description and legacy acquisitions at the National Library of Wales. Previously a curator of photographs and metadata manager, at present he manages the Library’s varied special collections, their digitisation and description and is responsible for metadata standards at the institution. Stuart Dunn is a lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He graduated from the University of Durham with a PhD in Aegean Bronze Age Archaeology in 2002, conducting fieldwork and research visits in Athens, Melos, Crete and Santorini, as well as excavating in Northumberland. Having
- 22. Notes on Contributorsxvii developed research interests in geographic information systems, Stuart subsequently became a Research Assistant on the AHRC’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme. In 2006, he became a Research Associate at the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre at King’s College London, and subsequently a Research Fellow in CeRch and lecturer. Stuart manages/ contributes to several projects in the area of visualisation, GIS and digital humanities. He has research interests in the use of digital methods in landscape history, spanning digital archaeology, visualisation in cultural heritage and GIS. He has published in all these areas; is a co-organiser of the London Digital Classicist group and chairs the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London conference, under the auspices of the Computer Arts Society and the BCS. He has worked on the digital reconstruction of Iron Age round houses, on the construction of a digital gazetteer of historic English place names and on various web 2.0 digital community projects, especially those involving crowdsourcing. In 2012, he co-led a Crowdsourcing Scoping Study funded by the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme (www.stuartdunn.wordpress.com). Kathryn Eccles is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Kathryn’s research interests lie in the impact of new technologies on public engagement with cultural heritage, and on scholarly behaviour and research in the Humanities. She recently completed an AHRC Early Career Fellowship, which focused on the impact of crowdsourcing on the digital art collection Your Paintings, and continues to research in the area of public participation, and the interface between academics, cultural heritage and the public. Previous research has focused on the usage and impact of digitised scholarly resources, the impact of digital transformations on the Humanities and the role of e-infrastructures in the creation of global virtual research communities. She holds a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, and a BA and MPhil from the University of Birmingham. Alexandra Eveleigh is currently completing a PhD thesis on the impact of user participation on archival theory and practice. Her research has been funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative doctoral award, jointly supervised by the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL) and The NationalArchives in the UK, and a UCLcross-disciplinary scholarship in conjunction with the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC). She previously worked as Collections Manager at West YorkshireArchive Service, and prior to this as an archivist at the University of Southampton. She is particularly interested in digital technologies in an archival context, and is a Winston Churchill Fellow in connection to her work on local digital archives. Riste Gligorov is a PhD student in the Web Media group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include social tagging and games with a purpose
- 23. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage xviii for annotation and retrieval of video content. Gligorov has an MSc in computer science and engineering from the Technical University of Denmark. Andrew Greg is Director of the National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) in the College of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow. He studied History of Art at the University of Cambridge and spent a career in fine art curatorship and museum management in the Midlands and North-East of England. His curatorial interests included fine and decorative arts, contemporary craft and architecture. Since 2001 he has worked on museum collection research and digitisation projects, including NIRP, and, with the Public Catalogue Foundation, Your Paintings and the pioneering crowdsourcing project Your Paintings Tagger. He is currently interested both in promoting the public knowledge and understanding of art and museum collections, and in the creation, structuring and dissemination of cataloguing data. Mark Hedges is the Director of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities, teaching on a variety of modules in the MA in Digital Asset and Media Management. His original academic background was in mathematics and philosophy, and he gained a PhD in mathematics at University College London, before starting a 17-year career in the software and systems consultancy industry, working on large-scale development projects for industrial and commercial clients. After a brief career break – during which he studied LateAntique and Byzantine Studies – he began his career at King’s in the Arts and Humanities Data Service. His research interests include digital libraries and archives, and the application of computational methods and ‘big data’ in the humanities, social sciences and culture. He was recently PI of a Crowdsourcing Scoping Study funded by the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme. Michiel Hildebrand is a Postdoctoral researcher at the VU UniversityAmsterdam in the Web Media group and also at CWI in the Information Access group. He researches interactive information systems for Linked Data and Media. He is work package manager in the European project LinkedTV and is part of the Dutch research project Data2Semantics. Lorna M. Hughes is the University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections, based in the National Library of Wales. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. Lorna leads a research programme based around the digital collections of the National Library of Wales, with a particular focus on understanding the use, value and impact of digital resources on research, teaching and public engagement. She is particularly interested in the use of ICT tools and methods for the analysis of large-scale digital crowdsourcing of our cultural heritage collections, and in research collaborations between humanities and scientific disciplines.
- 24. Notes on Contributorsxix PriortotakingupherappointmentinJanuary2011,sheworkedatKing’sCollege London, most recently as the Deputy Director of the Centre for e-Research, and the co-Director of theArts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC). From 2005 to 2008, she was Programme Director for the AHRC ICT Methods Network, a national initiative to promote and support the use of digital research across the arts and humanities disciplines. She has worked in digital humanities at New York University, Arizona State University, Oxford University and Glasgow University. She is the author of Digitizing Collections: Strategic Issues for the Information Manager (London: Facet, 2004), the editor of Evaluating Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections (London: Facet, 2011), and the co-editor of The Virtual Representation of the Past (London: Ashgate, 2007). She is presently Chair of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (www.nedimah.eu), and the PI on a JISC-funded mass digitisation initiative The Welsh Experience of the First World War (cymru1914.org). Rhian James is a full–time PhD candidate at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, focusing on the potential of digital humanities approaches to large corpora of unstructured archival data, specifically in the context of the digitised wills and probate collection held at the National Library of Wales (NLW). Her research is funded by a University of Wales scholarship and is co-supervised through the NLW research programme in digital humanities. Prior to this, she completed an MScEcon in archive administration at Aberystwyth University and has worked for periods as an assistant archivist at NLW and at Powys County Archives Office. Rhian is currently exploring the feasibility of community generated manuscript transcription in a library and archive setting. Michael Lascarides is the Manager of the New Zealand National Library Online (part of the DigitalNZ team) and the author of the book Next-Gen Library Redesign (from ALA Press). Prior to moving to New Zealand in 2012, he was head of the New York Public Library’s web design and development team and a member of the MFA Computer Art faculty at the School of Visual Arts. Sharon M. Leon is the Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. Leon received her bachelor of arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997, and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by University of Chicago Press (May 2013). Her work has appeared in Church History, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Public Historian and a number of edited collections. She is currently doing research on the Catholic Left in the United States after Vatican II. At RRCHNM, Leon oversees collaborations with library, museum and archive partners from around the country. She directs the Center’s digital exhibit and archiving projects, as well as research and tool development for
- 25. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage xx public history, including Omeka and Scripto. Finally, Leon writes and presents on using technology to improve the teaching and learning of historical thinking skills. Johan Oomen is Head of the RD Department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and researcher at the Web and Media group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2012 he was elected as Network Officer for Europeana and board member of CLICK-NL, the Dutch Creative Industries knowledge and innovation network. His PhD research at the VU University focuses on how active user engagement can help to establish a more open, smart and connected cultural heritage. Oomen holds a BA in Information Science and an MA in Media Studies. He has worked for the British Universities Film and Video Council and RTL Nederland. Trevor Owens is a digital archivist at the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress and a doctoral student at GMU. He is interested in online communities, digital history, and video games. He blogs at http://www.trevorowens.org/, and at playthepast.org. Melissa Terras is Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL’s Department of Information Studies. With a background in Classical Art History, English Literature and Computing Science, her doctorate (University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Digital Images for the Information Professional (Ashgate, 2008). She is the secretary of the European Association of Digital Humanities, on the board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, and the General Editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible, and she is one of the project co-investigators for Transcribe Bentham. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras. Ben Vershbow is founder and manager of NYPL Labs, an in-house technology startup at The New York Public Library which has won awards for its inventive handling of archives and special collections online. Investigating what a public memory organisation can be in the age of the network, Labs projects invite deep interaction with library materials, collaborating directly with users on the creation of new digital resources, data sets and tools. Before joining NYPL, Ben worked for four years with Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a Brooklyn-based think tank exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing. Ben studied theatre at Yale and is active as a writer/director/performer around New York, creating original work with his company Group Theory.
- 26. Series Preface Thisseriesexploresthevariouswaysbywhichengagementwithdigitaltechnologies is transformingresearch in the arts and humanities. Digital tools and resources enable humanities scholars to explore research themes and questions which cannot be addressed using conventional methods, while digital artists are reshaping such concepts as audience, form and genre. Digital humanities is a convenient umbrella term for these activities, and this series exemplifies and presents the most exciting and challenging research in the digital humanities. Digital humanities encompass the full spectrum of arts and humanities work, and scholars working in the digital humanities are strongly committed to interdisciplinary and collaborative methods. Consequently the digital humanities are inextricably bound to a changing view of the importance of the arts and humanities in society and provide a space for restating and debating the place of arts and humanities disciplines within the academy and society more widely. As digital technologies fundamentally reshape the sociology of knowledge, they challenge humanities scholars and artists to address afresh the fundamental cognitive problem of how we know what we know. Computing is the modelling of method, and this series reflects the belief that digital humanities proceeds by examining from many different perspectives the methods used in the arts and humanities, in some cases modifying and extending them, and in others drawing on relevant fields to develop new ones. The volumes in this series describe the application of formal computationally based methods in discrete but often interlinked areas of arts and humanities research. The distinctive issues posed by modelling and exploring the archives, books, manuscripts, material artefacts and other primary materials used by humanities scholars, together with the critical and theoretical perspectives brought to bear on digital methods by the arts and humanities, form the intellectual core of the digital humanities, and these fundamental intellectual concerns link the volumes of this series. Although generally concerned with particular subject domains, tools or methods, each title in this series is accessible to the arts and humanities community as a whole. Individual volumes not only stand alone as guides but collectively provide a survey of ‘the state of the art’ in research on the digital arts and humanities. Each publication is an authoritative statement of current research at the time of publication and illustrate the ways in which engagement with digital technologies are changing the methods, subjects and audiences of digital arts and humanities. While reflecting the historic emphasis of the digital humanities on methods, the series also reflects the increasing consensus that digital humanities should have a strong theoretical grounding and offers wider critical perspectives
- 27. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage xxii in the humanities. The claim that digital humanities is an academic discipline is frequently controversial, but the range and originality of the scholarship described in these volumes is in our view compelling testimony that digital humanities should be recognised as a major field of intellectual and scholarly endeavour. These publications originally derived from the work of the AHRC ICT Methods Network, a multi-disciplnary partnership which ran from 1 April 2005 to 31 March 2008 providing a national forum for the exchange and dissemination of expertise, with funding from the UK’sArts and Humanities Research Council. The success of this network in generating strong synergies across a wide community of researchers encouraged the continuation of this series, which bears witness to the way in which digital methods, tools and approaches are increasingly featuring in every aspect of academic work in the arts and humanities.
- 28. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction Mia Ridge This book brings together for the first time the collected wisdom of international leaders in the theory and practice of the emerging field of cultural heritage crowdsourcing. It features eight accessible case studies of groundbreaking projects from leading cultural heritage and academic institutions, and four thought- provoking essays that reflect on the wider implications of this engagement for participants and on the institutions themselves. Crowdsourcing, originally described as the act of taking work once performed within an organisation and outsourcing it to the general public through an open call for participants,1 is becoming increasingly common in museums, libraries, archives and the humanities as a tool for digitising or computing vast amounts of data, whether the private correspondence of eighteenth-century English philosophers (Chapter 3) or modern Dutch popular television (Chapter 7). Asking members of the public to help with tasks can be hugely productive – for example, participants in the Old Weather project (Chapter 2) transcribed over a million pages from thousands of Royal Navy logs in less than two years,2 the entire 1940 US Census was indexed by 160,000 volunteers in just four months,3 the National Library of Australia’s Trove project has over 130 million transcription corrections and more than 2.8 million tags4 and participants in the British Library’s Georeferencer project have added spatial coordinates to thousands of historic maps.5 And cultural heritage crowdsourcing is not limited to transforming existing content into digital formats – Museum Victoria’s Describe Me is crowdsourcing descriptions of their objects for people who are blind,6 Snapshot Serengeti asks people to identify animals recorded by remote cameras7 and Galaxy Zoo’s Quench project asks ‘citizen scientists’ to help analyse results and collaborate with scientists to write 1 Howe, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’. 2 Brohan, ‘One Million, Six Hundred Thousand New Observations’. 3 1940 US Census Community Project. 4 As of June 2014. Current figures are listed at http://trove.nla.gov.au/system/ stats?env=prod. 5 http://www.bl.uk/maps/. 6 http://describeme.museumvictoria.com.au/. 7 Kosmala, ‘Some Results from Season 4’.
- 29. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 2 an article on their findings.8 But crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of engagement with the collections and research of memory institutions, it benefits both audiences and institutions. Cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects ask the public to undertake tasks that cannot be done automatically, in an environment where the activities, goals (or both) provide inherent rewards for participation, and where their participation contributes to a shared, significant goal or research interest. Crowdsourcing can be immensely effective for engaging audiences with the work and collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs), and there is growing evidence that typical GLAM crowdsourcing activities encourage skills development and deeper engagement with cultural heritage and related disciplines.9 For organisations whose missions encompass engaging people with cultural heritage, there is sometimes a sense that, as Trevor Owens says in Chapter 12, the transcriptions produced are a ‘wonderful by-product’ of creating meaningful activities for public participation. This book will help practitioners who wish to create their own crowdsourcing projects understand how other institutions found the right combination of source material and tasks for their ‘crowd’– typically, a combination of casual participants and dedicated ‘super contributors’ working online – to achieve the desired results. Building a successful crowdsourcing project requires an understanding of the motivations for initial and on-going participation, the characteristics of tasks suited to crowdsourcing and the application of best practices in design for participation, content validation, marketing and community building. For readers interested in the workings of museums, libraries, archives and academia, this volume is an opportunity to hear from people behind the projects about their goals, their experiences building and launching crowdsourcing sites, what worked and what did not, how their designs improved over successive iterations and how these projects changed the host organisation. Sharon Leon’s report (Chapter 4) that almost 10 per cent of people registering to use the Scripto tool were motivated by curiosity about the transcription tool and process suggests the need for this collection of in-depth reports. The case studies in Part I of this book discuss a range of approaches taken to various materials, audiences and goals by a selection of internationally significant projects in museums, libraries, archives and universities. Part II features theoretical reflections on the impact of crowdsourcing on GLAM professionals; institutional relationships with audiences; public engagement and organisational mission; and the implications of new models of authority. Together, the chapters collected here will help organisations understand both the potential of crowdsourcing, and the practical and philosophical implications of inviting the public to work with them on our shared cultural heritage. 8 Trouille, ‘Galaxy Zoo Quench’. 9 Ridge, ‘From Tagging to Theorizing’; Dunn and Hedges, ‘Crowd-Sourcing Study’.
- 30. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 3 Background and Context As the pioneering projects described here inspire others, it is an apt moment to reflect on the lessons to be learnt from them. The projects discussed range from crowd-curated photography and art exhibitions to collecting objects at in-person ‘roadshow’ events. The number of projects in the emerging field of cultural heritage crowdsourcing increases constantly and the subsequent lessons learnt by museums, libraries, archives and academia are gradually being absorbed back into those institutions and in turn inspire new ideas. A range of disciplines and roles have informed the perspectives collected here. They range from historians interested in scholarly editions of archival documents, to technologist- and collections-led public engagement and data enhancement projects in museums, to archivists considering the challenges of participatory archives. Further differences are apparent in the approaches museums, libraries and archives have developed for managing physical collections and the knowledge around them, and in their preferred forms of public access and engagement. However, as designs for online collections tend to follow similar principles, the disciplinary differences between the providers of those collections appear to be converging (at least from the audiences’ perspective).10 Defining ‘Crowdsourcing’and Related Concepts SinceitscoiningbyJeffHoweandMarkRobinsonin2006,theterm‘crowdsourcing’ has been used as a label for a variety of new and pre-existing concepts. It is worth returning to Jeff Howe’s ‘White Paper Version’of their definition: ‘Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.’11 Interestingly, Howe’s ‘soundbyte’ definition of crowdsourcing – the ‘application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software’– does not retain the problematic relationship with ‘outsourcing’, instead claiming an affinity with the highly skilled activities and mutually beneficial ethos of open source software development. Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage benefits from its ability to draw upon the notion of the ‘greater good’ in invitations to participate, and this may explain why projects generally follow collaborative and cooperative, rather than competitive, models. Concepts often grouped under the same ‘umbrella’ in the commercial crowdsourcing sector include ‘crowd contests’, or ‘asking a crowd for work and only providing compensation to the chosen entries’12 and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (collective decision-making or 10 For further discussion of this, see Duff et al., ‘From Coexistence to Convergence’. 11 Undated quote in the sidebar of Howe, ‘Crowdsourcing: A Definition’. 12 Bratvold, ‘Defining Crowdsourcing’s Taxonomy’. For an account of the dangers of crowd contests for GLAMs, see Sweetapple, ‘How the Sydney Design Festival Poster Competition Went Horribly Wrong’.
- 31. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 4 problem-solving), which is referred to in several chapters (particularly Chapter 1, but also Chapters 6, 7, 10 and 12). Crowdfunding, or crowdsourced fundraising, makes only a brief appearance (see Chapter 10) but is obviously an issue in which many institutions are interested. At first, GLAM crowdsourcing projects may look similar to Web 2.0-style user-generated content (UGC) projects which invite audiences to ‘have your say’. However, crowdsourcing projects are designed to achieve a specific goal through audience participation, even if that goal is as broadly defined as ‘gather information from the public about our collections’. Citizen science, in which ‘volunteers from the general public assist scientists in conducting research’13 has been an influential model for humanities and ‘citizen history’14 crowdsourcing projects. ‘Crowdsourcing’, whether in the commercial, heritage or academic sectors, is suffering the fate of many buzzwords as its boundaries are pushed by those with something to sell or careers to make. Alexandra Eveleigh points out in Chapter 9 that the term is applied broadly, and even retrospectively, to ‘almost any initiative in the field which seeks to engage users to contribute to archives or to comment upon archival practice’ (p. 211) online.15 Various definitions of cultural heritage crowdsourcing reveal unresolved tensions about the role of expertise and the disruption of professional status, or lines of resistance to the dissolving of professional boundaries. Ultimately, however, definitions that seek to draw a line around crowdsourcing so that some projects can be ‘in’ while others are ‘out’ are less useful than thinking of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage as a coalescence around a set of principles, particularly the value placed on meaningful participation and contributions by the public. Defining ‘the Crowd’in Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing While ‘crowdsourcing’is a useful shorthand, many projects and writers have used other terms for ‘crowd’ participants, such as ‘community-sourcing’ (Chapters 4, 11), ‘targeted crowdsourcing’ (Chapter 6), or ‘micro-volunteering’ (Chapter 5), acknowledging that often the crowd is neither large nor truly anonymous, but perhaps also reflecting discomfort with the broadness, anonymity or vagueness of ‘the crowd’. These terms additionally reflect the fact that while some cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects are inspired by a desire for greater public engagement, the more specialised the skills, knowledge or equipment required, the more strongly a ‘crowd-sifting’ effect operates as individuals unable to acquire the necessary attributes fall out from the pool of potential participants (as discussed in Chapter 3). 13 Raddick et al., ‘Galaxy Zoo’. 14 Frankle, ‘More Crowdsourced Scholarship’. 15 See also Estelles-Arolas and Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara, ‘Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition’ and Ridge, ‘Frequently Asked Questions about Crowdsourcing’.
- 32. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 5 Models for Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage The issues facing contemporary crowdsourcing projects are not new. Accepting contributionsfrommembersofthepublicforinclusionincollectionsdocumentation and other informatics systems has always raised issues about how to validate those contributions. Nineteenth-century natural historians corresponding with amateur observers about the distribution of botanical specimens had to try to determine the veracity and credibility of their contributions,16 just as modern manuscript transcription projects such as Transcribe Bentham (Chapter 3) initially questioned the editorial quality of volunteer-produced transcripts. The Smithsonian Institution has a long history17 with ‘proto-crowdsourcing’, as does the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose editor launched in 1879 an ‘Appeal to the English- speaking and English-reading public’ to help provide evidence for the history and usage of words to complete the dictionary.18 Many chapters relate crowdsourcing to long traditions of volunteer augmentations of GLAM collections (see for example Chapter 6). Technology has enabled crowdsourcing as we know it, but models for public participation in collection, research and observation pre-date it. The ability of digital technologies to provide almost instantaneous data gathering and feedback, computationally validate contributions and the ability to reach both broad and niche groups through loose networks have all been particularly important in the modern era. As some chapters explicate, the ability to track data provenance computationally and verify remediated primary sources is particularly important for scholarly projects. Digitisation has also helped manage the limitations of physical space, conservation, location and opening hours that previously affected access to collections.19 UNESCO’s definition of ‘cultural heritage’ as ‘the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes […] inherited from past generations’ provides a broad outline for this book.20 Cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects have followed a variety of models, including ‘commons-based peer-production’ and participatory archives (see Chapters 4 and 9). The National Library of Australia’s Trove21 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) correction project (and Rose Holley’s excellent articles on its genesis, process and results)22 has been hugely influential. 16 Secord, ‘Corresponding Interests’. 17 For examples, see Millikan, ‘Joseph Henry’ and Bruno, ‘Smithsonian Crowdsourcing since 1849!’. 18 Gilliver, ‘“Your Dictionary Needs You”’. The original text of the 1879 appeal is available at http://public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/archived-documents/april-1879- appeal/april-1879-appeal/. 19 Ridge, ‘From Tagging to Theorizing’. 20 UNESCO Office in Cairo, ‘Tangible Cultural Heritage’. 21 http://trove.nla.gov.au/. 22 See for example Holley, Many Hands Make Light Work and Holley, ‘Crowdsourcing’.
- 33. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 6 The Zooniverse23 suite of citizen science projects, which began with Galaxy Zoo, has been particularly important, and some cultural heritage organisations have used the Zooniverse software platform for their own projects. Lori Byrd Phillips examines the evolution of the open source model as a form of ‘barn raising’ by online communities in Chapter 11, and several other authors cite the open source software movement as a model for their own projects or have released the code for their crowdsourcing tools under open source licences. Some crowdsourcing projects were inspired by organisational missions – in Chapter 1, Shelley Bernstein relates Brooklyn Museum’s innovative digital projects to their ‘community-driven mission’. Others realise the potential importance of crowdsourcing to their mission through developing projects – Michael Lascarides and Ben Vershbow (Chapter 5) report that the New York Public Library came to regard crowdsourcing ‘not only as a way to accomplish work that might not otherwise be possible, but as an extension of our core mission’ (p. 115). In Chapter 6, Lyn Lewis Dafis, Lorna M. Hughes and Rhian James’ translation of ‘crowdsourcing’ into Welsh (‘cyfrannu torfol’) highlights the ‘collective contributions’ and community engagement so important to the National Library of Wales. Common Tasks in Cultural Heritage Crowdsourcing Generally, the tasks performed by participants in cultural heritage crowdsourcing involve transforming content from one format to another (for example, transcribing text or musical notation), describing artefacts (through tags, classifications, structured annotations or free text), synthesising new knowledge, or producing creative artefacts (such as photography or design). Additional semantic context is required for structured text search – for example, searches for specific entities like people, places or events within large datasets – and can be supported through ‘structured transcription’, in which metadata that describe the entity through emergent or externally defined concepts are recorded alongside the transcribed text. Two common approaches to structured transcription are discussed in various chapters. The Transcribe Bentham project (Chapter 3) uses full text transcription wrapped in descriptive ‘inline’ tags where additional information is desired, while user interfaces for Old Weather (Chapter 2) and What’s on the Menu? (Chapter 5) are designed to transcribe relevant sections of text into pre-defined database fields. The inherent variability of materials in cultural heritage collections means that the same class of task – whether transcribing handwriting, tagging a painting or georeferencing a map – could be quick and uncomplicated or could require tricky subjective judgement to accomplish, depending on the legibility of the source material and the cognitive overhead required to (for example) add structured mark-up or choose between hierarchical subject terms. While many chapters focus on digitising documents as varied as wills and menus, other tasks 23 http://www.zooniverse.org/.
- 34. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 7 include crowd curation and creativity with artworks and photography, creating descriptive tags for paintings and time-based annotations for audio-visual archives, and georeferencing maps. Some participants prefer apparently ‘simple’ tasks like correcting errors in OCR-generated transcriptions or classifying images (though the sophisticated visual processing and pattern recognition required is a form of ‘human computation’ that computers cannot easily manage), while others prefer more complex tasks that require subjective judgement or specific skills or knowledge. Key Trends and Issues To paraphrase a military adage, it seems ‘no plan survives contact with the crowd’, and many initiatives change significantly after their initial launch. Several successful case studies report on iterative improvements to interfaces, in part because a high quality ‘user experience’ (particularly task design) is vital for creating interfaces that are both productive and engaging. Chapter 4 discusses improvements to the Scripto interface designed to help transcribers work with documents more effectively, Chapter 5 describes tweaks to the What’s on the Menu? interface and Chapter 3 reports on newly launched (at the time of writing) improvements to the Transcribe Bentham interface. Contact with participant communities also seems to change a project in more fundamental ways, including the development of new research questions. As Lucinda Blaser reports in Chapter 2, Old Weather was initially promoted ‘as a climate science project as this was the scientific goal of the project, but the audience saw it as a historical research project’ (p. 54). If crowdsourcing projects are almost inevitably changed (and changed for the better) by contact with the crowd, they necessarily create a challenge for any organisations and funders used to regarding the website launch as the end of their active involvement with a project. The resources and workflows required for community management (for example, content moderation, communication and updates on progress) and maintaining the supply of content are relatively new for many organisations, even when some tasks can themselves be crowdsourced. When Howe stated that a ‘crucial prerequisite’ in crowdsourcing is a ‘perfect meritocracy’ based not on external qualifications but on ‘the quality of the work itself’,24 he created a challenge for traditional models of authority and credibility. This challenge underlies many reflections in this volume, particularly those of Lori Byrd Phillips in Chapter 11. A model for public participation in science research devised by Bonney et al.25 is useful for categorising non-commercial crowdsourcing projects according to the amount of control participants have over the design of the project itself – or to look at it another way, how much authority the organisation has ceded to the crowd. Their model contains three categories: ‘contributory’, where the public contributes data to a project designed by the organisation; 24 Howe, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’; Howe, Crowdsourcing. 25 Bonney et al., Public Participation in Scientific Research.
- 35. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 8 ‘collaborative’, where the public can help refine project design and analyse data in a project led by the organisation; and ‘co-creative’, where the public can take part in all or nearly all processes, and all parties design the project together. It may be that by providing opportunities to help define questions for study or analyse data (rather than merely contribute it), collaborative project structures are a factor in successfully encouraging deeper engagement with related disciplines. Several chapters (including Chapters 2, 8 and 10) discuss the ways in which the crowd may also be changed by their contact with cultural heritage organisations, interests and collections. A strength of this volume is the accumulation of insights about participant demographics and motivations and the ways in which participants have developed their skills and experience through crowdsourcing projects. The importance of ‘super contributors’ who often do most of the work on a project is also a common theme. Institutional drivers behind the popularity of crowdsourcing include the sheer quantity of archival material and a desire to make better use of collections in the face of reduced funding for digitisation and other collections work. However, it appears that crowdsourcing projects also change the institution and related professions (see, for example, Chapter 9). While the potential savings in staff resources and enhancements to collections are the most obvious benefits of cultural heritage crowdsourcing, deepening relationships with new and pre-existing communities has been important to many organisations. Ultimately, the key trend in cultural heritage crowdsourcing is the extent and pace of constant change. Looking to the Future of Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage Currently, crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is mostly focused on using the capacity of interested publics to transform existing content from one format to another, and exploring the ‘wisdom of crowds’ through crowd-curation. However, projects like Old Weather (Chapter 2, see also Chapter 10) demonstrate opportunities for generating new knowledge and research questions, and there is great potential in archive-based participatory digitisation projects embedded in the work researchers are already performing, such as the Papers of the War Department. The discussion of Transcribe Bentham hints at future challenges ahead: improvements in machine learning and computational ability to deal with tasks that were previously better (and enjoyably) performed by people – such as transcribing handwriting, OCR correction, describing images and discerning patterns – might render these activities less meaningful as crowdsourced tasks. Kittur et al. offer a vision of ‘hybrid human-computer systems’ that ‘tap into the best of both human and machine intelligence’, 26 but the impact on cultural heritage crowdsourcing remains to be seen. However, crowdsourcing projects continue to evolve to meet these challenges and other changes in the digital and social landscape. For example, the genealogy site FamilySearch released a mobile 26 Kittur, ‘The Future of Crowd Work’.
- 36. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 9 application that allows people to transcribe small ‘snippets’ of text on their phone or tablet; a response to technological changes that also encourages participants to help even while ‘waiting to be seated at a restaurant’.27 The Structure and Content of This Book The case studies in Part I offer insights into the genesis of various projects, the motivations of participants and practical lessons for interface design. Some focus on single projects while others present an overview of relevant activities across the whole organisation. In Chapter 1, ‘Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn’, Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein looks closely at three large-scale projects grounded in their collections, locale and audiences: Click!, a crowdsourced exhibition; Split Second, an experiment in responsive interpretation; and GO: a community-curated open studio project. She explores their roots in specific research questions and in the Museum’s mission to engage the community. She explains how they were designed for very specific types of participation, and the cumulative impact of these initiatives on the organisation and its goals. In Chapter 2, ‘Old Weather: Approaching Collections from a Different Angle’, Lucinda Blaser explores the potential for citizen science projects to enhance historic collections while also producing genuine scientific results, explaining that in the Old Weather project, ‘many users came for the climate science but stayed for the history’ (p. 46). She discusses how crowd-curation and data enhancement projects relate to Royal Museum Greenwich’s mission, and how cultural heritage crowdsourcing and citizen science can unite the riches within collections with passionate and dedicated supporters. In Chapter 3, ‘“Many Hands Make Light Work. Many Hands Together Make Merry Work”: Transcribe Bentham and Crowdsourcing Manuscript Collections’, Tim Causer and Melissa Terras explain the considerable volume and variety of the archive on which University College London’s Transcribe Bentham project is based. They review its value as an experiment with complex, challenging tasks – the opposite of the micro-tasks discussed elsewhere – and the validation required for scholarly editions, and re-evaluate their earlier assessment of the return on investment in crowdsourcing transcription. They also consider the impact of publicity, the importance of super-contributors and introduce their newly redesigned interface. In Chapter 4, ‘Build, Analyse and Generalise: Community Transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the Development of Scripto’, Sharon M. Leon describes the lessons learnt from developing the Scripto application for community transcription of the distributed collections of the Papers of the War Department. She explains how it tapped into the existing user community, 27 Probst, ‘New FamilySearch Indexing App Now Available’.
- 37. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 10 the process of generalising the tool for use as a transcription platform by other projects and its place in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s philosophy of public history. In Chapter 5, ‘What’s on the Menu?: Crowdsourcing at the New York Public Library’, Michael Lascarides and Ben Vershbow present the New York Public Library’s What’s on the Menu? project, which aimed to turn historical menus into a searchable database, but was so successful at engaging the public that the library had to reorganise workflows to maintain the supply of menus. They discuss the factors that make a crowdsourcing project successful, the goals of various iterations in the interface design and the importance of their public mission to the project. Lyn Lewis Dafis, Lorna M. Hughes and Rhian James discuss the National Library of Wales’ crowdsourcing projects in Chapter 6, ‘What’s Welsh for “Crowdsourcing”? Citizen Science and Community Engagement at the National Library of Wales’, including the Cymru1900Wales place name gathering project, the community content generation exercise around First World War material and their experiments around community transcription of wills for Welsh Wills Online. They relate these projects and crowdsourcing generally to the overall work of the library. In Chapter 7, ‘Waisda?: Making Videos Findable with Crowdsourced Annotations’, Johan Oomen, Riste Gligorov and Michiel Hildebrand present the design decisions behind the social tagging game Waisda? and consider the impact of participatory culture on institutions. They elaborate on the results of extensive evaluations carried out in this long-term research project from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, one of Europe’s largest audiovisual archives, and VU University Amsterdam, including two large-scale pilots involving thousands of users. Kathryn Eccles and Andrew Greg discuss the Your Paintings Tagger project in Chapter 8, ‘Your Paintings Tagger: Crowdsourcing Descriptive Metadata for a National Virtual Collection’, including the project background and goals. They examine the impact of working with multiple stakeholders (including academics, the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation) and understandings of expertise, and the impact this had on design decisions and metadata standards. The results of user research, including a profile of taggers, their motivations for participation and the potential for providing a platform for community are discussed. Part II of this book explores the challenges and opportunities of cultural heritage crowdsourcing, including the potential for better relationships with the public and new ways of thinking about informal education. These chapters also consider the implications of participatory projects for heritage organisations and professionals and current notions of authority. In Chapter 9, ‘Crowding Out theArchivist? Locating Crowdsourcing within the Broader Landscape of Participatory Archives’, Alexandra Eveleigh contrasts the hype around ‘crowdsourcing’with the reality, reflects on the impact crowdsourcing has had on the archival profession and makes a significant contribution in her matrix for conceptually mapping the ‘participatory landscape’ in relation to archives.
- 38. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 11 In Chapter 10, ‘How the Crowd Can Surprise Us: Humanities Crowdsourcing and the Creation of Knowledge’, Stuart Dunn and Mark Hedges examine crowdsourcing from an academic humanities perspective, looking beyond ‘mechanical tasks’ to ‘the creation of complex content and the circulation of knowledge’, and propose a valuable framework for thinking about humanities crowdsourcing in terms of assets, processes, tasks and outputs. Lori Byrd Phillips reflects on the potential for a model of ‘open authority’ to meet the challenge organisations face in balancing institutional expertise with the potential of collaborative online communities. She draws on models from technology, education and museum theory to present solutions for addressing issues of democratisation and voice in a fast-paced digital world in Chapter 11, ‘The Role of Open Authority in a Collaborative Web’. In Chapter 12, ‘Making Crowdsourcing Compatible with the Missions and Values of Cultural Heritage Organisations’, Trevor Owens considers the compatibility of crowdsourcing with the ‘values and missions’ of cultural heritage organisations, and concludes that the value of crowdsourcing lies not only in the productivity of the crowd but in ‘providing meaningful ways for the public to enhance collections while more deeply engaging with and exploring them’(p. 279). Taken together, these chapters not only provide an overview of current projects and practices – they also provide a glimpse of the ways in which audiences and institutions can together discover the future of crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. References 1940 US Census Community Project, ‘We Did It!The 1940 US Census Community Project’, 2012. http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b0de542dc933cfcb848d 187eaid=c6e095aa92. Bonney, R., H. Ballard, R. Jordan, E. McCallie, T. Phillips, J. Shirk and C.C. Wilderman. Public Participation in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report. Washington, DC: Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), 2009. http://caise.insci.org/uploads/docs/PPSR%20 report%20FINAL.pdf. Bratvold, D. ‘Defining Crowdsourcing’s Taxonomy – a Necessary Evil’. Daily Crowdsource, 2011. http://dailycrowdsource.com/2011/09/07/crowd-leaders/ crowd-leader-david-bratvold-defining-crowdsourcings-taxonomy-a-necessary- evil/. Brohan, P. ‘One Million, Six Hundred Thousand New Observations’. Old Weather Blog, 2012. http://blog.oldweather.org/2012/07/23/one-million-six-hundred- thousand-new-observations/. Bruno,E.‘SmithsonianCrowdsourcingsince1849!’.SmithsonianInstitutionArchives, April 14, 2011. http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-1849.
- 39. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 12 Duff,W.M.,J.Carter,J.M.Cherry,H.MacneilandL.C.Howarth.‘FromCoexistence to Convergence: Studying Partnerships and Collaboration among Libraries, Archives and Museums’. Info 18, no. 3 (2013). http://informationr.net/ir/18–3/ paper585.html. Dunn, S. and M. Hedges. ‘Crowd-Sourcing Study: Engaging the Crowd with Humanities Research’. AHRC Connected Communities Programme, 2012. http://crowds.cerch.kcl.ac.uk. Estelles-Arolas, E. and F. Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara. ‘Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition’. Journal of Information Science 38, no. 2 (2012): 189–200. Frankle, E. ‘More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History’. Center for the Future of Museums, 2011. http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/ more-crowdsourced-scholarship-citizen.html. Gilliver, P. ‘“Your Dictionary Needs You”: A Brief History of the OED’s Appeals to the Public’. Oxford English Dictionary, October 4, 2012. http://public.oed. com/the-oed-appeals/history-of-the-appeals/. Holley, R. Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers. Canberra: National Library of Australia, March 2009. Holley,R.‘Crowdsourcing:HowandWhyShouldLibrariesDoIt?’.D-LibMagazine 16, no. 3/4 (2010). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/holley/03holley.html. Howe, J. ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’. Wired, June 2006. http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/14.06/crowds_pr.html. Howe, J. ‘Crowdsourcing: A Definition’. June 2, 2006. http://crowdsourcing. typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html. Howe, J. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. 1st Edn. New York: Crown Business, 2008. Kittur, A., J.V. Nickerson, M. Bernstein, E. Gerber, A. Shaw, J. Zimmerman, M. Lease and J. Horton. ‘The Future of Crowd Work’. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2013, 1301–18. http:// dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441923. Kosmala, M. ‘Some Results from Season 4’. Snapshot Serengeti Blog, 2013. http://blog.snapshotserengeti.org/2013/01/30/some-results-from-season-4/. Millikan, F.R. ‘Joseph Henry: Father of Weather Service’. The Joseph Henry Papers Project, Smithsonian Institution Archives, 2012. http://siarchives. si.edu/history/jhp/joseph03.htm. Probst, D. ‘New FamilySearch Indexing App Now Available’. LDSTech, 2012. http://tech.lds.org/index.php/component/content/article/1-miscellaneous/455- new-familysearch-indexing-app-now-available. Raddick, M.J., G. Bracey, P.L. Gay, C.J. Lintott, P. Murray, K. Schawinski, A.S. Szalay and J. Vandenberg. ‘Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers’. Astronomy Education Review 9, no. 1 (2010). http:// portico.org/stable?au=pgg3ztfdp8z.
- 40. Crowdsourcing Our CulturalHeritage: Introduction 13 Ridge, M. ‘Frequently Asked Questions about Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage’. Open Objects, 2012. http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/ frequently-asked-questions-about.html. Ridge, M. ‘From Tagging to Theorizing: Deepening Engagement with Cultural Heritage through Crowdsourcing’. Curator: The Museum Journal 56, no. 4 (2013): 435–50. Secord, A. ‘Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth- Century Natural History’. British Journal for the History of Science 27, no. 4 (1994): 383–408. Sweetapple, K. ‘How the Sydney Design Festival Poster Competition Went Horribly Wrong’. The Conversation, May 24, 2013. http://theconversation. com/how-the-sydney-design-festival-poster-competition-went-horribly- wrong-14199. Trouille, L. ‘Galaxy Zoo Quench – Experience the Full Scientific Process’. Galaxy Zoo, 2013. http://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2013/07/10/galaxy-zoo-quench- experience-the-full-scientific-process/. UNESCO Office in Cairo. ‘Tangible Cultural Heritage’, undated document. http:// www.unesco.org/new/en/cairo/culture/tangible-cultural-heritage/.
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- 44. Chapter 1 Crowdsourcing inBrooklyn Shelley Bernstein Overthepastdecade,theBrooklynMuseum’sleadershiphasdevelopedathoughtful and comprehensive strategy to rethink the Museum experience and strengthen its offerings in order to inspire visitors. Starting with its core mission, the Museum’s priority is to build on a long-established commitment to serve its communities: to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience; committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs; and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation; the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.1 In the digital efforts at the Brooklyn Museum, we strive to bring to life this community-driven mission and all that it can mean both in the visitor’s experience within the building and online. In this chapter, we will look closely at selected large-scale projects to show the differences between them, discuss how the institution’s goals have shifted over time, and demonstrate how each project – from digital comment books; Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition; Split Second: Indian Paintings, an experiment in responsive interpretation to GO: a community-curated open studio project – was designed for a very specific kind of participation. Early Projects When first starting our digital efforts in 2007, we began asking ourselves what community meant on the web and quickly found inspiration in the image hosting site Flickr which hosted a strong community of participants deeply engaged in photography. The community at Flickr had been fostered through a series of design choices that allowed for strong associations and recognition among participants. When looking at a photograph on the site, you could see the life behind it by getting to know the photographer through how they saw the world, and also through other photographers who were commenting or tagging images in ways that allowed us to 1 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/about/mission.php.
- 45. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 18 get to know them, too. The most successful thing about the design of the site was what its founder, Caterina Fake, said were her own goals in creating platforms for the web, ‘You should be able to feel the presence of other people on the Internet.’2 You could feel the presence of people pervasively throughout the Flickr platform; it had been designed to foster community from the very early days of the site’s creation. Our challenge was to take these same ideas and apply them to a museum setting. How could we could we highlight the visitor’s voice in a meaningful way and utilise technology and the web to foster this exchange? Two early efforts included major projects both in the gallery and online – the publication of our collection on the website and the creation of electronic comment books throughout the galleries. There is nothing more important to a museum than the objects which form its basis and the visitors coming through its doors; both projects were designed to help to form a backbone of trust between visitors and the Museum, allowing them a voice in our facility and holdings. When publishing our collection online3 we wanted object records to come to life, infused with the visitor activity around them. Each collection record would allow people to tag, comment and mark it as a ‘favourite’, but they would also go beyond simple information gathering by asking people to join our ‘Posse’, a community of participants on the Museum’s collection website who would help us augment object records while being attributed for their efforts. When a visitor to our website looks at an object in our collection, they can quickly see a whole universe of activity around it with people commenting and tagging objects; it is easy to see an individual’s activity and to gain an understanding of who they are and the contributions they have made because this activity is displayed right along with the Museum’s object in question. In addition to allowing this type of activity on each object’s page, online and in-gallery games were created which allow participants to tag or clean up records in a more competitive setting. Through this project, the institution has gained valuable information which has helped fix problems in our collection online4 and has made our collection more accessible through tagging contributions. During the same year the Museum began a project to replace existing paper visitor comment books with electronic versions which would run on small computer kiosks and, later, iPads. These comment books, available in every major gallery, ask our visitors to tell us about their experiences. The feedback we receive is displayed both in the gallery and online, while curatorial and visitor services staff are emailed weekly digests of the activity. Using this system, a visitor can leave us a comment about their experience and another potential visitor can read those thoughts online before deciding to come and see a show because both positive and 2 Leonard, ‘What You Want’. 3 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/. 4 See, for example, the comment pointing out an upside-down image on http://www. brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/164389/%7CUntitled%7C_Horses_Eye/set/ right_tab/talk/.
- 46. Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn19 negative comments are displayed on an exhibition’s web presence. As staff receive weekly digests about the visitor experience, they can quickly discover what worked and did not within any given show. Staff have been able to adapt and change the visitor experience on the fly based on some of the feedback received, but with larger issues, staff consider how to adjust future shows to improve those experiences. The comment books present the institution with a full cycle of participation and learning, allowing our visitors to participate in feedback and honouring that participation by showing it to other visitors and our staff to gain greater understanding of what each person experiences when he or she comes to the Museum. Theseearlyinitiativesincrowdsourcinghaveallowedouraudiencetoparticipate while the institution gained considerable insight into its holdings and audience, but both examples fell short of a truly meaningful exchange. Visitor interactions with objects on our website were never connected to their in-person visitation and, though they could participate, there was no way to have a meaningful dialogue. Community members could establish profiles and, as a result, there was a life to their presence online, but it was fairly limited in scope. Staff could respond to comments left in the electronic comment books, but visitors were not notified if their questions had been answered or, more importantly, that their feedback had made a difference. As we continue to move forward with these two initiatives we are developing ways to bridge the online and in-person visitor gap. In the meantime, we have also looked to create more specific projects which would allow visitor interaction with the institution to become all the more meaningful and create a deeper sense of engagement. Crowdsourcing as Exhibition In 2008, the Museum embarked on Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, a photography installation that invited the general public to participate in the exhibition design process. The project took its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserted that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals. Click! explored whether Surowiecki’s premise could be applied to the visual arts. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that maintaining diversity and independence are two key factors for a crowd to be wise. Both issues are discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3 of the book: Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision making. Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second,
- 47. Crowdsourcing our CulturalHeritage 20 independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.5 While we had been designing for community in early projects, the subject matter of Click! required us to design for crowds. In addition to trying to discover if a diverse crowd was just as ‘wise’ at evaluating art as the trained experts, the Brooklyn-focused content of Click! was intended to foster a local audience and to put the community’s choices on the walls of the institution, which was normally seen as sacred space for curators. Click! began with an open call asking photographers to submit a work of photography electronically that would respond to the exhibition’s theme, ‘Changing Faces of Brooklyn’. While not specifically requiring photographers to be Brooklyn-based, the theme was defined to appeal to those who understood the borough and to, eventually, foster a local audience of visitors coming to view the exhibition. As Surowiecki had noted, diversity was a key factor in facilitating wise decision-making among crowds, so the theme was selected with an eye towards the variety of interpretations it could inspire. In total, 389 photographers submitted images, with subjects ranging from Brooklyn’s ongoing gentrification, depictions of social issues facing the borough and specific scenes in neighbourhoods which illustrated the changes taking place in familiar areas. In order to minimise influences from outside the project, the open call was a blind process, each participant could only submit one photograph for consideration, and during the call photographers could not see the photographs submitted by other photographers. Despite these design choices to foster crowd-like participation, communities quickly formed around the process. Many of the photographers were creating small groups who would go out and shoot every weekend, discuss the resulting work, and post their progress online throughout the four week submission period prior to selecting the single work they would eventually submit. After the conclusion of the open call, the general public was asked to evaluate photographs online using a specifically designed interface which would minimise influence, another factor important to Surowiecki’s theory. While many of the features seen on successful websites are designed to foster community, they also create a great deal of influence – the number of views, comments, favourites, most emailed and leader boards of the modern website are built to influence others. When thinking about the creation of a tool where submitted photographs would be evaluated, we wanted to minimise influence as much as possible and rethink the ‘social’ design features now commonplace. During the six week evaluation period, anyone on the web could evaluate the pool of 389 submitted photographs. As part of the evaluation, each participant self-selected his/her knowledge level (from ‘none’ to ‘expert’) and geographic 5 Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, 29.
- 48. Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn21 location. Participants were asked to assess the photographs that were submitted, using a sliding scale to label photographs from ‘most’ to ‘least’ effective, taking into consideration aesthetics, the photographic techniques used and the relevance of the work to the exhibition’s theme. The online evaluation tool was designed to promote fairness. Works were presented at random, and an algorithm ensured all photographs were seen an equal number of times. To minimise influence, works were displayed without the artist attribution; evaluators were unable to skip past images or to forward links to individual works. Participants could leave comments during the rating process, but they were not visible to other participants until after the exhibition had opened. The constraints created to minimise influence and get our community thinking as a crowd of independents participants were frustrating to many participants and responses were varied, from blog comments like: Regarding the evaluation process I’ll describe my own experience. I didn’t evaluate any images. Not that I didn’t want to but I found myself to be unsuited to the process. Ideally I would have preferred to have been able to view icons or small sized versions of the images and select the ones that appealed to me for closer, full sized, evaluation. I don’t remember the exact constraints of the process at this point, but that overview which I would have preferred was not available. Reading the commentary I can now understand the wisdom of that, in that it would have allowed some people to flood the evaluations with good or bad judgments. I think that still could have been possible if someone or group was very much inclined to do so. But at least it would have required some patience and effort. So the aspect of random image choice makes sense.6 to: This is a brilliant idea. At first I had the urge to check and see how others were rating the works that I had rated, but after reading your post here I am impressed by the design. It does indeed seem to promote unbiased evaluation. I will be curious to see the results!7 and: It’s shocking to hear that the evaluation tool was so disliked. I found it simple, intuitive and very satisfying to use. When judging images, particularly such a large number, the subtle details matter. The slider interface gracefully captured that. The evaluation would have been frustrating if we had been limited to 6 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2008/06/04/gaming- click/comment-page-1/#comment-373. 7 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2008/03/31/ minimizing-influence/comment-page-1/#comment-208.
- 49. Figure 1.1 Theonline evaluation tool used for Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition allowed participants to view images and rate them on a sliding scale. Screenshot: Brooklyn Museum Website
- 50. Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn23 something like a 5 point scale. The before/after thumbnails were the right size: large enough to provide a sense of context but small enough to prevent me from processing the image. I rated every image and there’s no way that would’ve happened without this interface. I’ve pointed several people to it as a great example of elegant design. If others were mostly frustrated about the methodology, I sympathize. Nonetheless, the rigor makes this more than just some marginal online poll or social networking experiment. Evaluating stacks of images can be exhausting. It’s worth it because you never know what great shot awaits.8 In the end, however, participants took on the task given to them and accepted the challenges presented by the evaluation interface, and 3,344 evaluators cast 410,089 evaluations. On average, an evaluator looked at 135 works and viewed an image for 22 seconds before casting an evaluation. Even though commenters could not see the words of others to help spark thoughts and ideas, 3,098 comments were given during the evaluation period. Interestingly, no matter how much we specifically engineered the project for a broad crowd, it was the local community who put the most time and effort into Click! Even though evaluation took place on the web and participants in more than 40 countries took part in rating photographs, 64.5 per cent of participants were local to the extended ‘tri-state area’ around New York. A deeper look at the statistics reveals that the bulk of the participation was coming from a local audience: 74.1 per cent of the evaluations were cast by those in the tri-state area with 45.7 per cent of evaluations being cast by those within Brooklyn. When the exhibition opened on 27 June 2008 the top 20 per cent of the 389 images curated by the crowd were installed in the physical gallery. Within the installation, images were displayed at various sizes according to their relative ranking, so upon entering the gallery a visitor could see almost instantly which images the crowd had most responded to. Data about each image were published on the website9 along with the comments that were left during the evaluation stage. The website also presented the results according to the self-rated knowledge (from ‘none’ to ‘expert’) provided by participants: there was a remarkable similarity in each group’s top choices.10 Whether the final choices were, indeed, ‘wise’ is a matter of opinion given the subjectivity of art in general, but the resulting data suggested there was a lot of agreement about which images resonated and surfaced to the top. More important than the data gathered was the community’s response to the exhibition. A total of 20,000 people came to see the show during the six week 8 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2008/05/27/thank-you/ comment-page-1/#comment-270. 9 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/intro.php. 10 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/comparison.php.
- 51. Figure 1.2 Click!A Crowd-Curated Exhibition was installed in the Brooklyn Museum from 27 June to 10 August 2008. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum
- 52. Crowdsourcing in Brooklyn25 installation and museum guards anecdotally reported it seemed as if there was always a flurry of activity in the small gallery on the second floor where Click! was installed. Surrounded by photographs in the small space, visitors would lounge on large platform-like seating installed in the middle of the gallery and use laptops to access the resulting data on the website. Photographers would proudly come into the space and pose with their work. Responsive Interpretation in a Split Second Our next large-scale visitor-driven project came in 2011 with the launch of Split Second: Indian Paintings.11 Split Second was an opportunity to facilitate collaboration between our curators and our online community using in-gallery technology and the web to learn more about the visitor experience. The online experiment and resulting installation explored how someone’s initial reaction to a work of art is affected by what they already know, are asked or are told about the object in question. Unlike Click!, the work in Split Second came directly from our permanent collection and the project was intended as a way to use interactive technology to foster a dialogue about works in our collection and how we install them. The main source of inspiration for this project was Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, a book which explores the power and pitfalls of initial reactions and split-second thinking. The Split Second project would explore the ideas around quick judgement and test how a person’s split- second reaction to a work of art would affect their museum-going experience. As visitors walk through our galleries, what kind of work are they drawn to? And if they stop, look, read or respond, how does their opinion of that work change? Split Second began with an eight week online evaluation; audiences participated in a three-part online activity which featured the Indian paintings of the Museum’s permanent collection. The first stage explored split-second reactions: in a timed trial, participants were shown two random objects side by side and asked to select which painting of the pair they preferred. Next, participants were asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a sliding scale. In the third phase, participants were asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside a typical interpretive text written by museum staff. Each part of the exercise aimed to examine how a different type of information – or a lack thereof – might affect a person’s reaction to a work of art. During the online evaluation, participants reported being ‘stressed out’ by having to select between two works of art very quickly, but analysis showed that the majority of participants completed all three phases of the online activity. In total 4,617 participants created 176,394 ratings and spent 7 minutes and 32 seconds on average in their session. Demographics of those participating in the activity were 11 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/labs/splitsecond/.
- 53. Figure 1.3 Theonline evaluation tool designed for Split Second: Indian Paintings displayed two objects side by side and asked participants to select as quickly as possible which painting they preferred from the pair. Screenshot: Brooklyn Museum Website
- 54. Figure 1.4 SplitSecond: Indian Paintings culminated in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum which ran from 13 July 2011 to 1 January 1 2012. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum
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- 59. The Project GutenbergeBook of Principles of Political Economy
- 60. This ebook isfor the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Principles of Political Economy Author: Arthur Latham Perry Release date: January 28, 2013 [eBook #41936] Most recently updated: October 23, 2024 Language: English Credits: E-text prepared by Colin Bell, JoAnn Greenwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://archive.org/details/americana) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY ***
- 61. The Project GutenbergeBook, Principles of Political Economy, by Arthur Latham Perry Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See http://archive.org/details/principlesofpoli00perrrich PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. PROFESSOR PERRY'S WORKS ON POLITICAL ECONOMY. 1. INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL ECONOMY. Fifth Edition. 12mo. 357 pp. Price, $1.50. 2. PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 8vo. 585 pp. Price, $2.00. 3. POLITICAL ECONOMY. Twenty-First Edition. Crown 8vo. 600 pp. Price, $2.50.
- 62. PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY BY ARTHUR LATHAMPERRY, LL.D. Orrin Sage Professor of History and Political Economy in Williams College No task is ill where Hand and Brain And Skill and Strength have equal gain, And each shall each in honor hold, And simple manhood outweigh gold. Whittier. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1891
- 63. COPYRIGHT, 1890, BY ARTHURLATHAM PERRY. Dedication. TO MY PERSONAL FRIEND OF LONG STANDING J. STERLING MORTON OF NEBRASKA A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE ALSO FOUNDER OF ARBOR DAY
- 64. PREFACE. It is nowexactly twenty-five years since was published my first book upon the large topics at present in hand. It was but as a bow drawn at a venture, and was very properly entitled Elements of Political Economy. At that time I had been teaching for about a dozen years in this Institution the closely cognate subjects of History and Political Economy; cognate indeed, since Hermann Lotze, a distinguished German philosopher of our day, makes prominent among its only five most general phases, the industrial element in all human history; and since Goldwin Smith, an able English scholar, resolves the elements of human progress, and thus of universal history, into only three, namely, the moral, the intellectual, and the productive. During these studious and observant years of teaching, I had slowly come to a settled conviction that I could say something of my own and something of consequence about Political Economy, especially at two points; and these two proved in the sequel to be more radical and transforming points than was even thought of at the first. For one thing, I had satisfied myself, that the word Wealth, as at once a strangely indefinite and grossly misleading term, was worse than useless in the nomenclature of the Science, and would have to be utterly dislodged from it, before a scientific content and defensible form could by any possibility be given to what had long been called in all the modern languages the Science of Wealth. Accordingly, so far as has appeared in the long interval of time since 1865, these Elements were the very first attempt to undertake an orderly construction of Economics from beginning to end without once using or having occasion to use the obnoxious word. A scientific substitute for it was of course required, which, with the help of Bastiat, himself however still clinging to the technical term Richesse, was discerned and appropriated in the word Value; a good word indeed, that can
- 65. be simply andperfectly defined in a scientific sense of its own; and, what is more important still, that precisely covers in that sense all the three sorts of things which are ever bought and sold, the three only Valuables in short, namely, material Commodities, personal Services, commercial Credits. It is of course involved in this simple- looking but far-reaching change from Wealth to Value, that Economics become at once and throughout a science of Persons buying and selling, and no longer as before a science of Things howsoever manipulated for and in their market. For another thing, before beginning to write out the first word of that book, I believed myself to have made sure, by repeated and multiform inductions, of this deepest truth in the whole Science, which was a little after embodied (I hope I may even say embalmed) in a phrase taking its proper place in the book itself,—A market for Products is products in Market. The fundamental thus tersely expressed may be formulated more at length in this way: One cannot Sell without at the same instant and in the same act Buying, nor Buy anything without simultaneously Selling something else; because in Buying one pays for what he buys, which is Selling, and in Selling one must take pay for what is sold, which is Buying. As these universal actions among men are always voluntary, there must be also an universal motive leading up to them; this motive on the part of both parties to each and every Sale can be no other than the mutual satisfaction derivable to both; the inference, accordingly, is easy and invincible, that governmental restrictions on Sales, or prohibitions of them, must lessen the satisfactions and retard the progress of mankind. Organizing strictly all the matter of my book along these two lines of Personality and Reciprocity, notwithstanding much in it that was crude and more that was redundant and something that was ill- reasoned and unsound, the book made on account of this original mode of treatment an immediate impression upon the public, particularly upon teachers and pupils; new streaks of light could not but be cast from these new points of view, upon such topics
- 66. especially as Landand Money and Foreign Trade; and nothing is likely ever to rob the author of the satisfaction, which he is willing to share with the public, of having contributed something of importance both in substance and in feature to the permanent up- building of that Science, which comes closer, it may be, to the homes and happiness and progress of the People, than any other science. And let it be said in passing, that there is one consideration well-fitted to stimulate and to reward each patient and competent scientific inquirer, no matter what that science may be in which he labors, namely, this: Any just generalization, made and fortified inductively, is put thereby beyond hazard of essential change for all time; for this best of reasons, that God has constructed the World and Men on everlasting lines of Order. As successive editions of this first book were called for, and as its many defects were brought out into the light through teaching my own classes from it year after year, occasion was taken to revise it and amend it and in large parts to rewrite it again and again; until, in 1883, and for the eighteenth edition, it was recast from bottom up for wholly new plates, and a riper title was ventured upon,—Political Economy,—instead of the original more tentative Elements. Since then have been weeded out the slight typographical and other minute errors, and the book stands now in its ultimate shape. My excellent publishers, who have always been keenly and wisely alive to my interests as an author, suggested several times after the success of the first book was reasonably assured, that a second and smaller one should be written out, with an especial eye to the needs of high schools and academies and colleges for a text-book within moderate limits, yet soundly based and covering in full outline the whole subject. This is the origin of the Introduction to Political Economy, first published in 1877, twelve years after the other. Its success as a text-book and as a book of reading for young people has already justified, and will doubtless continue to justify in the future, the forethought of its promoters. It has found a place in many popular libraries, and in courses of prescribed reading. Twice it
- 67. has been carefullycorrected and somewhat enlarged, and is now in its final form. In the preface to the later editions of the Introduction may be found the following sentence, which expresses a feeling not likely to undergo any change in the time to come:—I have long been, and am still, ambitious that these books of mine may become the horn-books of my countrymen in the study of this fascinating Science. Why, then, should I have undertaken of my own motion a new and third book on Political Economy, and attempted to mark the completion of the third cycle of a dozen years each of teaching it, by offering to the public the present volume? One reason is implied in the title, Principles of Political Economy. There are three extended historical chapters in the earlier book, occupying more than one- quarter of its entire space, which were indeed novel, which cost me wide research and very great labor, and which have also proven useful and largely illustrative of almost every phase of Economics; but I wanted to leave behind me one book of about the same size as that, devoted exclusively to the Principles of the Science, and using History only incidentally to illustrate in passing each topic as it came under review. For a college text-book as this is designed to become, and for a book of reading and reference for technical purposes, it seems better that all the space should be taken up by purely scientific discussion and illustration. This does not mean, however, that great pains have not been taken in every part to make this book also easily intelligible, and as readable and interesting as such careful discussions can be made. A second reason is, to provide for myself a fresh text-book to teach from. My mind has become quite too thoroughly familiarized with the other, even down to the very words, by so long a course of instructing from it, for the best results in the class-room. Accordingly, a new plan of construction has been adopted. Instead of the fourteen chapters there, there are but seven chapters here. Not a page nor a paragraph as such has been copied from either of the preceding books. Single sentences, and sometimes several of
- 68. them together, whenthey exactly fitted the purposes of the new context, have been incorporated here and there, in what is throughout both in form and style a new book, neither an enlargement nor an abridgment nor a recasting of any other. I anticipate great pleasure in the years immediately to come from the handling with my classes, who have always been of much assistance to me from the first in studying Political Economy, a fresh book written expressly for them and for others like-circumstanced; in which every principle is drawn from the facts of every-day life by way of induction, and also stands in vital touch with such facts (past or present) by way of illustration. The third and only other reason needful to be mentioned here is, that in recent years the legislation of my country in the matter of cheap Money and of artificial restrictions on Trade has run so directly counter to sound Economics in their very core, that I felt it a debt due to my countrymen to use once more the best and ripest results of my life-long studies, in the most cogent and persuasive way possible within strictly scientific limits, to help them see and act for themselves in the way of escape from false counsels and impoverishing statutes. Wantonly and enormously heavy lies the hand of the national Government upon the masses of the people at present. But the People are sovereign, and not their transient agents in the government; and the signs are now cheering indeed, that they have not forgotten their native word of command, nor that government is instituted for the sole benefit of the governed and governing people, nor that the greatest good of the greatest number is the true aim and guide of Legislation. I am grateful for the proofs that appear on every hand, that former labors in these directions and under these motives have proven themselves to have been both opportune and effective; and I am sanguine almost to certainty, that this reiterated effort undertaken for the sake of my fellow-citizens as a whole, will slowly bear abundant fruit also, as towards their liberty of action as individuals, and in their harmonious co-operation together as entire classes to the end of popular comforts and universal progress.
- 69. A. L. PERRY. WilliamsCollege, November 25, 1890. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I. Value 1 CHAPTER II. Material Commodities 80 CHAPTER III. Personal Services 181 CHAPTER IV. Commercial Credits 271 CHAPTER V. Money 361 CHAPTER VI. Foreign Trade 451 CHAPTER VII. Taxation 540 INDEX 587 PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.
- 71. CHAPTER I. VALUE. The firstquestion that confronts the beginner in this science, and the one also that controls the whole scope of his inquiries to the very end, is: What is the precise subject of Political Economy? Within what exact field do its investigations lie? There is indeed a short and broad and full answer at hand to this fundamental and comprehensive question; and yet it is every way better for all concerned to reach this answer by a route somewhat delayed and circuitous, just as it is better in ascending a mountain summit for the sake of a strong and complete view to circle up leisurely on foot or on horseback, rather than to dash straight up to the top by a cog- wheel railway and take all of a sudden what might prove to be a less impressive or a more confusing view. The preliminary questions are: What sort of facts has Political Economy to deal with, to inquire into, to classify, to make a science of? Are these facts easily separable in the mind and in reality from other kinds of facts perhaps liable to be confounded with them? Are they facts of vast importance to the welfare of mankind? And are the activities of men everywhere greatly and increasingly occupied with just those things, with which this science has exclusively to do? Let us see if we cannot come little by little by a route of our own to clear and true answers for all these questions. If one should take his stand for an hour upon London Bridge, perhaps the busiest bit of street in the world, and cast his eyes around intelligently to see what he can see, and begin also to classify the things coming under his vision, what might he report to himself and to others? Below the bridge in what is called the Pool,
- 72. which was dredgedout for that very purpose by the ancient Romans, there lie at anchor or move coming and going many merchant-ships of all nations, carrying out and bringing in to an immense amount in the whole aggregate tangible articles of all kinds to and from the remote as well as the near nations of the earth. All this movement of visible goods, home and foreign, is in the interest and under the impulse of Buying and Selling. The foreign goods come in simply to buy, that is, to pay for, the domestic goods taken away; and these latter go out in effect even if not in appearance to buy, that is, to pay for, the foreign goods coming in. At the same hour the bridge itself is covered with land-vehicles of every sort moving in both directions, loaded with salable articles of every description; artisans of every name are coming and going; merchants of many nationalities step within the field of view; and porters and servants and errand-boys are running to and fro, all in some direct relation to the sale or purchase of those visible and tangible things called in Political Economy Commodities. Moreover, vast warehouses built in the sole interest of trade on both sides the river above and below the bridge, built to receive and to store for a time till their ultimate consumers are found, some of these thousand things bought and sold among men, lift their roofs towards heaven in plain sight. Doubtless some few persons, like our observer himself, may be on the spot for pleasure or instruction, but for the most part, all that he can see, the persons, the things, the buildings, even the bridge itself, are where they are in the interest of Sales of some sort, mostly of Commodities. What is thus true of a single point in London is true in a degree of every other part of London, of every part of Paris and of Berlin, and in its measure of every other city and village and hamlet in the whole world. Wherever there is a street there is some exchange of commodities upon it, and wherever there is a market there are buyers and sellers of commodities. If the curiosity of our supposed observer be whetted by what he saw on London Bridge, and if the natural impulse to generalize from particulars be deepened in his mind, he may perhaps on his return to America take an opportunity to see what he can see and learn
- 73. what he canlearn within and around one of the mammoth cotton mills in Lowell or Fall River or Cohoes. Should he take his stand for this purpose at one of these points, say Lowell, he will be struck at once by some of the differences between what he saw on the bridge and what he now sees in the mill. He will indeed see as before some commodities brought in and carried out, such as the raw cotton and new machinery and the finished product ready for sale, but in general no other commodities than the cotton in its various stages of manufacture, and those like the machinery and means of transportation directly connected with transforming the cotton into cloth and taking it to market. But he sees a host of persons both within and without the mill, all busy here and there, and all evidently bound to the establishment by a strong unseen tie of some sort; he sees varying degrees of authority and subordination in these persons from the Treasurer, the apparent head of the manufactory, down to the teamsters in the yard and the common laborers within and without; he will not find the owners of the property present in any capacity, for they are scattered capitalists of Boston and elsewhere, who have combined through an act of incorporation their distinct capitals into a Company for manufacturing cotton; besides their Treasurer present, whose act is their act and whose contracts their contracts, he will see an Agent also who acts under the Treasurer and directly upon the Overseers and their assistants in the spinning and weaving and coloring and finishing rooms, and under these Operatives of every grade as skilled and unskilled; and lastly he will observe, that the direct representatives of the owners and all other persons present from highest to lowest are conspiring with a will towards the common end of getting the cotton cloth all made and marketed. What is it that binds all these persons together? A little tarrying in the Treasurer's office will answer this question for our observer and for us. He will find it to be the second kind of Buying and Selling. At stated times the Treasurer pays the salary of the Agent, and his own. He pays the wages of the Overseers and the wages of all the
- 74. Operatives and Laborers,—menand women and children. Here he finds a buying and selling on a great scale not of material commodities as before, but of personal services of all the various kinds. Every man and woman and child connected with the factory and doing its work sells an intangible personal service to the Company and takes his pay therefor, which last is a simple buying on the part of the unseen employers. Here, then, in this mill is a single specimen of this buying and selling of personal services, which is going on to an immense extent and in every possible direction in each civilized country of the world, and everywhere to an immensely increased volume year by year. Clergymen and lawyers and physicians and teachers and legislators and judges and musicians and actors and artisans of every name and laborers of every grade sell their intangible services to Society, and take their pay back at the market-rate. The aggregate value of all these services sold in every advanced country is probably greater than the aggregate value of the tangible commodities sold there. At any rate, both classes alike, commodities and services, are bought and sold under substantially the same economic principles. The inductive appetite in intelligent persons, that is to say, their desire to classify facts and to generalize from particulars, almost always grows by what it feeds on; and our supposed observer will scarcely rest contented until he has taken up at least one more stand-point, from which to observe men's Buying and Selling. Suppose now he enter for this purpose on any business-day morning the New York Clearing-House. He will see about 125 persons present, nearly one half of these bank clerks sitting behind desks, and the other half standing before these desks or moving in cue from one to the next. The room is perfectly still. Not a word is spoken. The Manager of the Clearing with his assistant sits or stands on a raised platform at one end of the room, and gives the signal to begin the Exchange. No commodities of any name or nature are within the field of view. The manager indeed and his assistant and two clerks of the establishment who sit near him are in receipt of salaries for their personal services, and all the other clerks present
- 75. receive wages fortheir services from their respective banks, but the exchange about to commence is no sale of personal services any more than it is a sale of tangible commodities. It is however a striking instance of the buying and selling of some valuables of the third and final class of valuable things. At a given signal from the manager the (say) 60 bank messengers, each standing in front of the desk of his own bank and each having in hand before him 59 small parcels of papers, the parcels arranged in the same definite order as the desks around the room, step forward to the next desk and deliver each his parcel to the clerk sitting behind it, and so on till the circuit of the room is made. It takes but ten minutes. Each parcel is made up of cheques or credit- claims, the property of the bank that brings it and the debts of the bank to which it is delivered. Accordingly each bank of the circle receives through its sitting clerk its own debits to all the rest of the banks, and delivers to all through its standing messenger its own credits as off-set. In other words, each bank buys of the rest what it owes to each with what each owes to it. It is at bottom a mutual buying and selling of debts. There is of course a daily balance on one side or the other between every two of these banks, which must be settled in money, because it would never happen in practice that each should owe the other precisely the same sum on any one day; but substantially and almost exclusively the exchange at the Clearing-House is a simple trade in credit-claims. Each bank pays its debts by credits. A merchant is a dealer in commodities, a laborer is a dealer in services, and a banker is a dealer in credits. Each of the three is a buyer and seller alike, and the difference is only in the kind of valuables specially dealt in by each. In all cases alike, however, there is no buying without selling and no selling without buying; because, when one buys he must always pay for what he buys and that is selling, and when one sells he must always take his pay for what he sells and that is buying. This is just as true when one credit is bought or sold against a commodity or a service, and when two or more credits are bought and sold as against each other,
- 76. as it iswhen two commodities or two services are exchanged one for the other. But the Clearing-House is not by any means the only place where credits or debts (they are the same thing) are bought and sold. Every bank is such a place. Every broker's office is such a place. Every place is an establishment of the same kind where commercial rights, that is, claims to be realized in future time and for which a consideration is paid, are offered for sale and sold. The amount of transactions in Credits in every commercial country undoubtedly surpasses the amount in Commodities or that in Services. Now our supposed observer and classifier, having noted on London Bridge the sale of material commodities, and in the Lowell Mill the sale of personal services, and within the New York Clearing-House the sale of credit-claims, has seen in substance everything that ever was or ever will be exhibited in the world of trade. He may rest. There is no other class of salable things than these three. Keen eyes and minds skilled in induction have been busy for two millenniums and a half more or less to find another class of things bought and sold among men, and have not yet found it or any trace of it. This work has been perfectly and scientifically done. The generalization is completed for all time. The genus, then, with which Political Economy deals from beginning to end, has been discovered, can be described, and is easily and completely separable for its own purposes of science from all other kinds and classes and genera of things, namely, Salable things or (what means precisely the same) Valuable things or (what is exactly equivalent) Exchangeable things. In other words, the sole and single class of things, with which the Science of Political Economy has to do, is Valuables, whose origin and nature and extent and importance it is the purpose of the present chapter to unfold. We have fully seen already that this Genus, Valuables, is sub-divided into three species, and three only, namely, Commodities, Services, Credits. A little table here may help at once the eye and the mind:—
- 77. ECONOMICS. The Genus Valuables TheSpecies { { { Commodities Services Credits If only these three species of things are ever bought and sold, then it certainly follows that only six kinds of commercial exchanges are possible to be found in the world, namely these:— 1. A commodity for a commodity. 2. A commodity for a personal service. 3. A commodity for a credit-claim. 4. A personal service for another service. 5. A personal service for a credit-claim. 6. One credit-claim for another. Though the kinds of possible exchanges are thus very few, the exchanges themselves in one or other of these six forms and in all of them are innumerable on every business day in every civilized country of the globe. And this point is to be particularly noted, that while buying and selling in these forms has been going on everywhere since the dawn of authentic History, it has gone on all the while in ever-increasing volume, it is increasing now more rapidly and variously than ever, and moreover all signs foretell that it will play a larger and still larger part in the affairs of men and nations as this old world gains in age and unity. Damascus is one of the very oldest cities of the world, and its very name means a seat of trade. We are told in the Scriptures, that Abraham about 2000 years before Christ went up out of Egypt very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold, and the only possible way he could have acquired these possessions was by buying and selling. He afterwards purchased the cave and the field in Hebron for a family burial-place, and weighed unto Ephron the silver which he had
- 78. named in theaudience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. We may notice here, that there were then merchants as a class, that silver by weight passed as money from hand to hand, and that in the lack of written deeds to land, as we have them, sales were made sure before the faces of living men, who would tell the truth and pass on the word. Abraham indeed seems to have given the pitch for the song of trade sung by his descendants, the Jews, from that day to this; for Jacob, his grandson, was a skilled trafficker, not to say a secret trickster, in his bargains; and wherever in the Old World or the New the Jews have been, there have been in fact and in fame busy buyers and sellers. But the Jews have had no special privileges in the realm of trade; on the contrary, they have always been under special disabilities both legal and social. Even in England, the most liberal country in Europe, they were exiled for long periods, maltreated at all points of contact with other people, more or less put under the ban of the Common and the Statute law, often outrageously taxed on their goods and persons, and studiously kept out of the paths of highest public employment even down to a time within the memory of living men. [1] Yet so natural is the impulse to trade, so universally diffused, so imperative also if progress is in any direction to be attained, that the English and all other peoples were as glad to borrow money, that is, buy the use of it, of the persecuted Jews, as the latter were to get money by buying and selling other things, and then to loan it, that is, sell the use of it, under the best securities (never very good) for its return with interest, that they could obtain. Happily, the mutual gains that always wait on the Exchanges even when their conditions are curtailed, of course attended the mutilated exchanges between Jews and Christians: otherwise, they would not continue to take place. Christianity, however, as the perfected Judaism, gradually brought in the better conditions, the higher impulses, and the more certain rewards, of Trade, all which, we may be sure, were designed in the
- 79. divine Plan ofthe world. What is called the Progress of Civilization has been marked and conditioned at every step by an extension of the opportunities, a greater facility in the use of the means, a more eager searching for proper expedients, and a higher certainty in the securing of the returns, of mutual exchanges among men. There have been indeed, and there still are, vast obstacles lying across the pathway of this Progress in the unawakened desires and reluctant industry and short-sighted selfishness of individuals, as well as in the ignorant prejudices and mistaken legislation of nations; but all the while Christianity has been indirectly tugging away at these obstacles, and Civilization has been able to rejoice over the partial or complete removal of some of them; while also Christianity directly works out in human character those chief qualities, on which the highest success of commercial intercourse among men will always depend, namely, Foresight, Diligence, Integrity, and mutual Trust; so that, what we call Civilization is to a large extent only the result of a better development of these human qualities in domestic and foreign commerce. Contrary to a common conception in the premises, the sacred books of both Jews and Christians display no bias at all against buying and selling, but rather extol such action as praiseworthy, and also those qualities of mind and habits of life that lead up to it and tend too to increase its amount, and they constantly illustrate by means of language derived from traffic the higher truths and more spiritual life, which are the main object of these inspired writers. It is indeed true that the chosen people of God were forbidden to take Usury of each other, though they were permitted to take it freely of strangers, and that they were forbidden to buy horses and other products out of Egypt, for fear they would be religiously corrupted by such commercial intercourse with idolaters; but there is nothing of this sort in the law of Moses that cannot be easily explained from the grand purpose to found an agricultural commonwealth for religious ends, in which commonwealth no family could permanently alienate its land, and in which it was a great object to preserve the independence and equality of the tribes and families. Throughout
- 80. the Old Testamentthere is no word or precept that implies that trade in itself is not helpful and wholesome; there were sharp and effective provisions for the recovery of debts; there were any number of exhortations to diligence in business, such as, In the morning sow thy seed, and at evening withhold not thy hand; King Solomon himself made a gigantic exchange in preparation for the temple with King Hiram of Tyre, by which the cedars of Lebanon were to be paid for by the grain and oil of the agricultural kingdom; chapter xxvii of the prophet Ezekiel is a graphic description of the commerce of the ancient world as it centered in the market of Tyre, a description carried out into detail both as to the nations that frequented that market and as to the products that were exchanged in it,—silver, iron, tin, lead, persons of men, vessels of brass, horses, horsemen, mules, horns of ivory, ebony-wood, carbuncles, purple work, fine linen, corals, rubies, wheat, pastry, syrup, oil, balm, wine of Helbon, white wool, thread, wrought iron, cassia, sweet reed, cloth, lambs, rams, goats, precious spices, precious stones, splendid apparel, mantles of blue, embroidered work, chests of damask, and gold; and chapter xxxi of Proverbs describes the model housewife in terms like these,— The heart of her husband trusteth in her, And he is in no want of gain. She seeketh wool and flax, And worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants' ships; She bringeth her food from afar. She riseth while it is yet night, And giveth food to her family, And a task to her maidens. She layeth a plan for a field and buyeth it; With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She perceiveth how pleasant is her gain, And her lamp is not extinguished in the night. She putteth forth her hands to the distaff, And her hands take hold of the spindle.
- 81. She maketh forherself coverlets; Her clothing is of fine linen and purple. She maketh linen garments and selleth them, And delivereth girdles to the merchants. Still more explicit and instructive are the words and spirit of the New Testament. There cannot be the least doubt that the whole influence of Christianity is favorable to the freest commercial exchanges at home and abroad, because these depend largely on mutual confidence between man and man, of which confidence Christianity is the greatest promoter. It may be conceded at once that our Lord overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the seats of them that sold doves within the sacred precincts of the temple, but this, not because it is wrong to change money or sell doves, but because that was not the place for such merchandising; so He himself explained his own action in the sequel; provincial worshippers coming up to Jerusalem must needs have their coins changed into the money of the Capital, and must needs buy somewhere the animal victims for sacrifice; but the whip of small cords had significance only as to the place, and not at all as to the propriety, of such trading. One of our Lord's parables, the parable of the Talents, sets forth in several striking lights the privilege and duty and reward of diligent trading. Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. And when this servant came to the reckoning, and brought as the result of his free and busy traffic five talents more, the prompt and hearty approval of his lord—well done, thou good and faithful servant—becomes the testimony of the New Testament to the merit and the profit and the benefit of a vigorous buying and selling. For this servant could not have been authoritatively pronounced good and faithful if the results of his action commended had been in any way prejudicial to others. The truth is, as we shall abundantly see by and by with the reasons of it, that any man who buys and sells under the free and natural conditions of trade, benefits the man he trades with just as
- 82. much as hebenefits himself. But the parable has a still stronger word in favor of exchanges. There was another servant also entrusted with capital by his lord at the same time, when the latter was about to travel into a far country. We are expressly told that distribution was made to every man according to his several ability, and thus this servant was only entrusted with a single talent, the size of the capital given to him being in just proportion to the size of the man,—the smallest share falling of course to the smallest man. But he had the same opportunity as the two others. The world was open to him. Capital was in demand, if not in those parts then in some other, to which, like his lord, he might straightway take his journey. But when his time of reckoning came, and he had nothing to show for the use of his capital, he upbraided his lord as a hard man for expecting any increase, and brought out his bare talent wrapped in a napkin, saying, I was afraid, and I went and hid thy talent in the earth. His wise lord at once denounced this servant as wicked and slothful, insisted that his money ought to have been put to the exchangers, and said finally in a just anger cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness. It is moreover in incidental passages of the Scriptures, in which the methods of business are commended to the searchers after higher things, that we see their high estimate of those methods and gains. Buy the truth, and sell it not; buy wisdom and understanding (Prov. xxiii, 23). Buying up for yourselves opportunities (Col. iv, 5). I counsel thee to buy of me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white garments, that thou mayest be clothed; and eye- salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see (Rev. iii, 18). But rather let him labor, working with his hands at that which is good, that he may have to give to him that is in need (Eph. iv, 28). But if any one provideth not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. v, 8). Now, the universal test and proof of any truth is its harmony with some other truths. Does an alleged truth fall in with and fill out well
- 83. some other demonstratedand accepted proposition, or a number of such other propositions? If so, then that truth is proved. Human reason can no further go. The mind rests with relish and content in a new acquisition. To apply this to the case in hand,—if men were designed of their Maker to buy and sell to their own mutual benefit and advancement, if mankind have always been buying and selling as towards that end and with that obvious result, and if the Future promises to increase and reduplicate the buying and selling of the Present in every direction without end, and all in the interest of a broad civilization and a true and lasting progress; and if, in harmony with these truths, the written revelation of God in every part of it assumes that buying and selling in its inmost substance and essential forms be good and righteous and progressive, and suitable in all its ends and methods to illustrate and enforce ends and methods in the higher kingdom of spiritual and eternal Life;—then these coördinate truths will logically and certainly follow, (1) that Trade is natural and essential and beneficial to mankind; (2) that it constitutes in an important sense a realm of human thought and action by itself, separate from the neighboring realm of Giving, and equally from the hostile realm of Stealing; and (3) that a careful analysis of what buying and selling in its own peculiar nature is, a thorough ascertainment and a consequent clear statement of its fundamental laws, and a faithful exposure of what in individual selfishness and in subtle or open Legislation makes against these laws, must be of large consequence to the welfare of mankind. Accordingly, let us now attempt such Analysis and Ascertainment and Exposure. This is precisely the task that lies before us in this book—just this, and nothing more. The term, Political Economy, has long been and is still an elastic title over the zealous work of many men in many lands; but in the hands of the present writer during a life now no longer short, the term has always had a definite meaning, the work has covered an easily circumscribed field, and so the present undertaking concerns only Buying and Selling and what is essentially involved in that. This gives scope and verge enough for the studies of a life-time. This has the advantage of a complete
- 84. sphere of itsown. Terms may thus be made as definite as the nature of language will ever allow; definitions will thus cover things of one kind only; and generalizations, although they may be delicate and difficult, will deal with no incongruous and obstinate material. 1. The grandfather of the writer, an illiterate but long-headed farmer, was able to give good points to his three college-bred sons, by insisting that they look into the natur on't. What, then, are the ultimate elements of Buying and Selling? What are the invariable conditions that precede, accompany, and follow, any and every act of Trade? Of course we are investigating now and throughout this treatise the deliberative acts of reasonably intelligent human beings, in one great department of their common foresight and rational action. We have consequently nothing to do here with Fraud or Theft or Mania or Gift. Acts put forth under the impulse of these are direct opposites of, or at best antagonistic to, acts of Trade. They tend to kill trade, and therefore they are no part of trade. These, then, and such as these, aside, we will now analyze a single Act of Exchange at one time and place,—which will serve in substance for all acts of exchange in all times and places, and just find out for ourselves what are the Fundamentals and Essentials of that matter, with which alone we have to do in this science of Political Economy. Incidental reference was had a little way back to an Exchange once made between King Solomon of Jerusalem and King Hiram of Tyre. Let that be our typical instance. (a) There were two persons, Solomon and Hiram. Those two, and no more, stood face to face, as it were, to make a commercial bargain. They made it, and it was afterwards executed. The execution indeed concerned a great many persons on both sides, and occupied a long period of time; but the bargain itself, the trade, the exchange, the covenant, concerned only two persons, and occupied but a moment of time. It made no difference with the bargain as such, with the binding nature of it, with the terms of it, with the mutual gains of it, that each person represented a host of others, subordinates and subjects, who would have to coöperate in the carrying of it out, because each king had
- 85. the right tospeak for his subjects as well as for himself, for commercial purposes each was an agent as well as a monarch, the word of each concluded the consent and the action of others as well as his own. Nor did it make any, the least, difference with this exchange or the advantages of it, that each party to it belonged to, was even the head of, independent and sometimes hostile Peoples. Commerce is one thing, and nationality a totally different thing. The present point is, in the words of the old proverb,—It takes two to make a bargain. And it takes only two to make a bargain. When corporations and even nations speak in trade, they speak, and speak finally, through one accredited agent. We reach, then, as the first bit of our analysis of Trade, the fact, that there are always two parties to it, the party of the first part and the party of the second part. (b) There were two desires, Solomon's desire for cedar-timbers to build the temple with, and Hiram's desire for wheat and oil with which to support the people of his sterile kingdom. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar-trees and fir-trees according to all his desire: and Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil. The desire of each party was personal and peculiar, known at first only to himself, but upon occasion became directed towards something in the possession of the other, and each at length became aware of the desire of the other, and also of his own ability to satisfy the want of the other. If Solomon could have satisfied his desire for timber by his own or his subjects' efforts directly, this trade would never have taken place; if Hiram or his subjects could have gotten the wheat and oil directly out of their narrow and sandy strips of sea-coast, this trade would not have taken place; and so there must be in every case of trade not only two desires each springing from a separate person, but also each person must have in his possession something fitted to gratify the desire of the other person, and each be willing to yield that something into the possession of the other for the sake of receiving from him that which will satisfy his own desire, and so both desires be satisfied indirectly.
- 86. Here is thedeep and perennial source of exchanges. Men's desires are so many and various, and so constantly becoming more numerous and miscellaneous, and so extremely few of his own wants can ever be met by any one man directly, that the foundation of exchanges, and of a perpetually increasing volume of exchanges, is laid in the deep places of human hearts, namely, in Desires ever welling up to the surface and demanding their satisfaction through an easy and natural interaction with the ever swelling Desires of other men. Here too is a firm foundation (a chief foundation) of human Society. Reciprocal wants, which can only be met through exchanges, draw men together locally and bind them together socially, in hamlets and towns and cities and States and Nations, and also knit ties scarcely less strong and beneficent between the separate and remotest nationalities of the earth. It is certain that an inland commercial route connected the East of Asia with the West of Europe centuries before Christ, and that a traffic was maintained on the frontier of China between the Sina and the Scythians, in the manner still followed by the Chinese and the Russians at Kiachta. The Sina had an independent position in Western China as early as the eighth century before Christ, and five centuries later established their sway under the dynasty of Tsin (whence our word China) over the whole of the empire. The prophet Isaiah exclaims (xlix, 12), Behold! these shall come from far; and behold! these from the North and from the West; and these from the land of Sinim. The second bit of our analysis leads to Desires as an essential and fundamental element in every commercial transaction. (c) There were two efforts, those of the Tyrians as represented by King Hiram and those of the Israelites as represented by King Solomon. It was no holiday task that was implied in the proposition of Solomon to the party of the other part,—Send me now cedar- trees, fir-trees, and algum-trees out of Lebanon; for I know that thy servants are skilful to cut timber in Lebanon; even to prepare me timber in abundance, for the house which I am about to build shall be wonderfully great. On the other hand, the efforts insolved on the part of the people of Israel in paying for these timbers, and for their
- 87. transportation by seafrom Lebanon to Joppa, were equally gigantic. Solomon's offer in return for the proposed service of the Tyrian king was in these words,—And behold, I will give to thy servants, the hewers that cut timber, twenty thousand measures of beaten wheat, and twenty thousand measures of barley, and twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty thousand baths of oil. The reason why two efforts are always an element in every act of traffic, however small or however large the transaction may be, is the obvious reason, that the things rendered in exchange, whether they be Commodities, Services, or Credits, invariably cost efforts of some kind to get them ready to sell and to sell them, and no person can have a just claim to render them in exchange, who has not either put forth these efforts himself or become proprietor in some way of the result of such efforts. Efforts accordingly are central in all trade. Every trade in its inmost nature is and must be either an exchange of two Efforts directly, as when one of two farmers personally helps his neighbor in haying for the sake of securing that neighbor's personal help in his own harvesting, or an exchange of two things each of which is the result of previous Efforts of somebody, as when a man gives a silver dollar for a bushel of wheat. The third bit of the present analysis brings us to Efforts, perhaps the most important factor in the whole list. (d) There were also two reciprocal estimates, the estimate of King Hiram of all the efforts requisite to cut and hew and float the timber, as compared with the aggregate of efforts needed to obtain the necessary wheat and barley and wine and oil in any other possible way; and the estimate of King Solomon of all the labors required to grow and market these agricultural products, as compared with what would otherwise be involved in getting the much-wished-for timbers. Such estimates invariably precede every rational exchange of products. It is not in human nature to render a greater effort or the result of it, when a lesser effort or the result of it will as well procure the satisfaction of a desire. Efforts are naturally irksome. No more of them will ever be put forth than is necessary to meet the want that
- 88. calls them forth.No man in his senses will ever put more labor on anything, with which to buy something else, than is necessary to get that something else by direct effort or through some other exchange. Here we are on ground as solid as the very substance of truth can make it. The Jews of Solomon's time were too shrewd and sparing of irksome labor to devote themselves for years to the toils of the field and of the vat to get by traffic the materials for their temple, if they could have gotten those materials by a less expenditure of toil in any other way. Those Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, the born merchants of the East, the founders of commercial Carthage in the West, if they could have extorted from the reluctant sands of their coast the cereals and the vines and olives requisite for their own support with only so much of exertion as was needed to get that to market with which to buy them, would never have taken the indirect in preference to the direct method. They took the indirect, because it was the easier, and therefore the better. It may, accordingly, be laid down as a maxim, that men never buy and sell to satisfy their wants but when that is the easiest and best way to satisfy them. It saves effort. It saves time. It saves trouble. It divides labor. It induces skill. It propels progress. But in order to determine which may be the easier way, requires constant estimates on the part of each party to a possible trade. Shall I shave myself or go to the barber? Before I decide, I estimate the direct effort in the light of the effort to get that with which to pay the barber for his service. If I trade with him, it is because I deem it easier, cheaper in effort, more convenient in time. Trade means comparisons in every case—comparisons by both parties—and in the more recondite and complicated cases, elaborate comparisons and often comprehensive calculations involving future time. Now these estimates inseparable from exchanges, and these calculations which are a factor in all the far-reaching exchanges, are mental activities. They quicken and strengthen the minds of men. Trade is usually, if not always, the initial step in the mental development of individuals and nations. Desires stir early in the
- 89. minds of allchildren; efforts more or less earnest are the speedy outcome of natural desires; direct efforts, however, to satisfy these soon reach their limits; it is now but a step over to simple exchanges, by which the desires are met indirectly; exchanges once commenced tend to multiply in all directions, and the estimates that must precede and accompany these are mental states,—the more of them, the greater the mental development, the higher the education; consequently, commerce domestic and foreign is a grand agency in civilization, a constant and broadening impulse towards progress in all its forms; and Christianity, as we have already seen, is friendly to commerce in its every breath. Those, therefore, who talk and preach about Trade as tending to materialism, do not know what they are talking about. Because Commodities are material things, and because a portion of the trade of the world concerns itself with commodities, these shallow thinkers jump to the conclusion that trade is materialistic. It is just the reverse. Let us hear no more from Professor Pulpit or Platform that buying and selling is antagonistic to men's higher intellectual and spiritual culture, because the present careful analysis has brought us indubitably to mental Estimates and prolonged comparisons, which are activities of Mind, as the fourth and a leading factor among the radical elements of Sale. (e) There were two renderings, King Hiram's rendering at Joppa the desired cedars from the mountains of Lebanon, and King Solomon's rendering in return at Tyre the food products grown in his fertile country. These renderings were visible to all men. Unlike the desires and the estimates, which were subjective and invisible; the actual exchange of the products, the culmination of the previous efforts, the stipulated renderings by and to each party, were outward and objective—known and read of all men. This is the reason why public attention is always strongly drawn to this particular link of the chain of events which we are now unlocking and taking apart, while other links of the series, that are just as essential, almost wholly escape observation. The ports and the markets are apt to be noisy and conspicuous, when the desires and the estimates and the
- 90. satisfactions, without whichin their place there would be no market- places, work in silence, and leave no records except the indirect one of the renderings themselves. It is of great moment to note here, that each of the two parties to an exchange always has an advantage over the other, either absolute or relative, in the rendering his own product, whatever it may be, as compared with his present ability to get directly or through any other exchange the product he receives in return. Take the example in hand. Cedars and sandal-wood were natural to Mount Lebanon; there were no other workmen in those regions of country that could skill to hew timber like unto the Sidonians; the Mediterranean afforded a level and free and easy highway from its northern coast to the Judean seaport at Joppa; and all these natural and acquired facilities put King Hiram into a posture of advantage in the rendering of timber, not only over the Jews, but also over all the other peoples in the basin of the midland sea. Still this advantage, great as it was, could only be made a real and palpable gain to themselves, the proprietors of the timber, by means of some exchange with somebody else, by which some wants of their own greater than their present want of timber, could be supplied by means of the timber. They had more of that commodity, and more skill to fashion and transport it, than their present and immediately prospective needs could make use of; and the only way in which they could practically avail themselves of their advantages, was, to sell their surplus timber and buy with it something that they needed more. Otherwise their very advantage perished with them. God has scattered such a diversity of blessings and capacities and opportunities over the earth on purpose, that, through traffic, on which his special benediction rests, the good of each part and people may become the portion of other parts and peoples. So, on the other hand, of the southern neighbors of the Tyrians. There the earth brought forth by handfuls. There was an abundance of corn in the land, even to the tops of the mountains. Its fruit did indeed shake like Lebanon. But there were no cedars there, no fir-
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