Looking for examples of aggregation communities
Colleagues, I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate the original content into a coherent whole. What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have existed for decades or centuries? Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts. Derek Hansen Assistant Professor iSchool University of Maryland
Derek Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) might fit. www.language-archives.org The overall community architecture is of local repositories of language/linguistic content, each described using a specific schema and volcabulary (OLAC extends OAI), and then OLAC central services are provided which aggregate this content into a larger collection. The volunteer angle is that the catalogue of local repositories is published by anyone from individual researchers through projects through educational and research institutions through libraries/museums/archives. While OLAC as a whole has had some funding from agencies like NSF, essentially the whole community is driven by contributing to a larger goal of an extensive online catalogue and repository of language materials. Baden On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Derek Hansen <shakmatt@gmail.com> wrote:
Colleagues,
I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate the original content into a coherent whole.
What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have existed for decades or centuries?
Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts. Derek Hansen Assistant Professor iSchool University of Maryland _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
On Sat, Oct 23, 2010, Derek Hansen wrote:
I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them
Hi -- the earliest bloggers, in the 1998 to 2000 era, were very much a volunteer network of information scavengers who aimed to "filter the Net". I've written two conference papers about this network, one chiefly on the man who envisaged the network and brought it into being: <http://tawawa.org/ark/p/jorn-barger-community.html> The other paper is about the process through which the network coalesced, which turned out to be citation for re-propagated links: <http://www.asna.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/2010/Papers/Ammann_paper.pdf>
The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve content rather than create it
Possibly of interest: The notion of curating came to be applied to blogging in 1999 at the latest: <http://oddfish.co.uk/2010/08/17/is-curating-the-new-editing/#comment-4> Best, Rudolf Ammann UCL Centre of Digital Humanities
Derek, If I remember well the historic German etymology dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, was collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the way you describe, starting in 1838, published since 1854 (and finished in 1961). Regards, F. Thomas On 23/10/2010 04:03, Derek Hansen wrote:
Colleagues,
I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate the original content into a coherent whole.
What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have existed for decades or centuries?
Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts. Derek Hansen Assistant Professor iSchool University of Maryland _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
participants (4)
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Baden Hughes -
Derek Hansen -
ftr -
Rudolf Ammann