Crowd sourcing: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history.

Crowdsourcing – the act of outsourcing tasks to an undefined, large community through an open call for aid – has been an increasingly used approach to solve distinct, data-based problems since the term was coined (Howe 2006). The cultural and heritage sectors have been keen to adopt crowdsourcing methodologies, both to enhance their collections, and to engage with potential audiences via increasingly mature internet technologies. Projects like the award-winning Transcribe Bentham (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/) have demonstrated that not only can an online audience help complete complex scholarly tasks, but the project itself can raise the profile of research and make academic activity more accessible. It is obvious that engaging with a wide constituency when attempting to capture the history – or various histories - of an academic field is necessary. The purpose of this discursive paper is to highlight issues surrounding the use of crowdsourcing, and its associated methodologies, to capturing the early histories of Humanities Computing. What approaches and measures can be used to gather useful information? How can we handle ephemera, and its related memories, tales, and stories? How can we handle the complex objects often produced by Humanities Computing scholarship? How can we “taskify” academic history