Crowd-Sourced and Citizen Data for Cultural Heritage (BENV0114)

Crowd-sourcing is transforming the way heritage data is obtained. By enabling anonymous citizens or visitors to produce measurements or carry out small tasks, heritage institutions can simultaneously increase data collection rates and engagement levels. These methods are, however, subject to important practical and theoretical problems. This groupwork based module equips you with the tools to think critically about crowd-sourcing methods in heritage and to evaluate the data obtained by them. You will learn how to design a crowd-sourcing exercise, and experiment with appropriate measures to control the quality of the obtained data. The data-gathering methods may be: the use of smartphones to obtain visual information (colour, dimension, area, shape), wearable and low-cost sensors to obtain information that can inform preventive conservation (pollutants, moisture, temperature) or to obtain textual information that can help interpretation (tags, classification of images, transcriptions). You will also develop statistical skills to assess the metrology of the crowd-sourced data. Finally, you will explore the scientific and ethical issues associated with this new type of analytical technique.

 

 

History|Human and Social Geography|Philosophy|Social Anthropology|Social History

Module Content

This course is intended to provide students taking masters degrees at UCL, who have no prior, university level, social science expertise with...

An Introduction to Social Theory - a foundation course (ANTH0110)

Module Content

This course is intended to provide students taking masters degrees at UCL, who have no prior, university level, social science expertise with an introduction to the history and current pertinence of social thought and the research methodologies associated with different schools of ‘social theory’. The course is, in particular, designed for students taking masters programs which are using a social science perspective or approach in order to broaden and deepen a line of enquiry or practice.

This includes the MA in Ethnographic and Documentary Film and Digital Anthropolog & MA Creative and Collaborative Enterprise; but the syllabus is designed to appeal to a much broader constituency beyond anthropology as well.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of taking this course you will:

- be familiar with a range of fundamental questions within and approaches to social theory. be familiar with the outlines of the historical development of social theory.

- become familiar with some specific disciplinary approaches to and contributions to social research and theory.

- become familiar with a range of methodological strategies for the generation and interrogation of data.

- be in a position to discriminate among some of the major writers in social theory, and to decide for yourself which approach to use when approaching particular social problems.

- have learnt to produce, at an introductory level, critical writing about social theory.

Delivery Method

One 1 hour lecture and one 1 hour seminar per week.