Abstract This critical research-through-design study at the Stockholm City Archives addresses the lack of research infrastructure supporting image researchers’ metadata needs. It contributes to CSCW by situating design within a broader system of technologies, norms, and institutional practices, revealing what is at stake for archivists and researchers. It shows how the digital transformation of archival practices, rather than enabled participation, has reduced the autonomy of institutions and archivists, reinforcing centralized control, framing user generated content as a risk to institutional legitimacy in an era of misinformation. The findings indicates that a more participatory metadata interface for researchers within the Swedish galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sector require a reformulation of the institutions' role, to being a facilitator and provider of the standards needed for long-term participation, where strong objectivity is developed through more transparent archival processes and decentralized practices.

Abstract Cultural heritage practices is formed by different socio‐technical regimes. Today, it is increasingly formed by the regime of commodification, expressed in terms like interoperability and reuse. This signifies a shift from a regime of the authentic object where the value is in the unique object positioned in a particular institutional context. To be able to exploit cultural heritage items on digital markets detached from their position in their original context, large resources are needed to furnish the items with metadata. In this metadata production, the regime of the institution as guarantor for the objects' authenticity, clash with the regime of aggregated trust, where authenticity is confirmed by aggregating data from multiple producers. This article argue that such rich contextual information is what creates long‐term value for digital archival objects. In this speculative design project focusing humanities research needs, I therefore turn the attention to the metadata producers. Taking the idea of metadata as a commodity to its peak, I show how we can interpret metadata as a supply to meet imaginary demands. By looking at metadata as imaginary demands we can begin to see the contours of the diverse conceptual models the archives carry.

Abstract This study of crowdsourcing practices at Kbhbilleder.dk at the Copenhagen City Archives provides a rich description of how motivation and work relations are situated in a wider infrastructure of different tools and social settings. Approximately, 94% of the work is here done by 7 of the 2,433 participants. The article contributes insights into how these super-taggers carry out their work, describing and placing images on a map, through an extensive discursive effort that takes place outside the institution’s more limited interface in private discussion forums with over 60 000 participants. The more exploratory qualitative work that is going on in different discussion groups does not fit within the archive’s technical framework. Instead, alternative archives are growing within privately owned networks, where participants’ own collections merge with images from public archives. Rather than focusing on the nature of participants’ motivation, the article suggests a relational perspective on participation that is useful for analyzing a systems’ support for participation. Pointing out how people’s motivation in citizen science correspond with relational and intra-relational aspects enables an approach to system design that potentially supports or counteracts these aspects.

Abstract In an era of big data and fake news, museums’ collection practices are particularly important democratic cornerstones. Participatory technologies such as crowdsourcing or wikis have been put forward as a means to make museum collections more open and searchable, motivated by a desire for efficiency but also as a way to engage the public in the development of a more diverse and polyphonic heritage. However, there is a lack of a nuanced vocabulary to describe participatory technologies in terms of democracy. Without a deeper understanding of how technology shapes the overall structures, there is a risk that the tools instead undermine democratic ambitions. Addressing the need to conceptualize democracy in these contexts, we therefore develop a framework for participatory technologies with an eye toward the long-term development and preservation of cultural heritage. In this framework different democratic processes intersect with democratic values, from a liberal conception of democracy to a more deliberative democracy, to an agonistic pluralism emphasizing the importance of acknowledging conflict and diversity. To firmly ground our vocabulary in museum collection practices, we have investigated two cases from museums in the US that have opposite participatory strategies for enriching images with metadata; the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the National Gallery of Art collection on Wikimedia Commons. These cases demonstrate how the framework can be used to identify patterns of participation showing the support for different values and processes. Furthermore, our conceptual investigation points out a contradiction in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research, between the pluralism and conflicts emphasized in more critical and participatory design perspectives used in the development of design, and the features in the actual design of participatory technologies, emphasizing consistency and access.

Abstract Open research data repositories are promoted as one of the cornerstones in the open research paradigm, promoting collaboration, interoperability, and large‐scale sharing and reuse. There is, however, a lack of research investigating what these sharing platforms actually share and a more critical interface analysis of the norms and practices embedded in this datafication of academic practice is needed. This article takes image data sharing in the humanities as a case study for investigating the possibilities and constraints in 5 open research data repositories. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the interface along with the technical means for metadata, the study shows how the platforms are differentiated in terms of signifiers of research paradigms, but that beneath the rhetoric of the interface, they are designed in a similar way, which does not correspond well with the image researchers' need for detailed metadata. Combined with the problem of copyright limitations, these data‐sharing tools are simply not sophisticated enough when it comes to sharing and reusing images. The result also corresponds with previous research showing that these tools are used not so much for sharing research data, but more for promoting researcher personas.

Abstract Online activism showcases how available digital tools allow social movements to emerge, scale up, and extend globally by fundamentally enabling new forms of power. This special issue brings together eight research articles that engage with the collaborative efforts embedded in various types of activism by studying features such as the socio-technical systems involved; how the activism is organized; relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics that constitutes such activisms. The articles show the spaces in which this activism materializes, and particularly their situation in several intersecting dimensions including motivation, culture, language, and infrastructure. Together, these articles reflect the methodological breadth required to materialize online activism and the need to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of the media ecologies involved. By mapping out how activism is enabled and constrained by human-computer interfaces, this special issue contributes to open up the black box of online activism.

Abstract Networked online environments can effectively support political activism. In Sweden, the #metoo movement resulted in over 100,000 people participating in activities challenging sexual harassment and abuse, including collecting testimonies via social media and drafting and discussing petitions published in print news media. Participation involved many risks, such as social stigma, losing one’s job, or misogynist terrorism, which meant that participation required a high level of trust among peers. Human-computer interaction (HCI) research on trust generally focuses on technical systems or user-generated data, less focus has been given to trust among peers in vulnerable communities. This study, based on semi-structured interviews and surveys of participants and organizers of 47 petitions representing different sectors in society, found that trust was aggregated over networks of people, practices, institutions, shared values, and technical systems. Although a supportive culture based on a feeling of solidarity and shared feminist values was central for safe spaces for participation, when activism was scaled up, social interaction had to be limited due to increased risk. HCI research views trust as a process of crossing distances, increasing over time; however, our results reveal that trust decreased over time as the movement grew and public exposure increased, a trend most evident when the participants actually came from a tightly knit community. Therefore, this study points out the significance to balance the need for transparency and community with the need for anonymity and distance in the development of tools to support large-scale deliberative processes that involve conflicts and risks.

Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging a crowd to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable appear diametrically in dissonance with the norms and culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing in traditional organizations. They require mechanisms for articulation of work, coordination, cooperation, and knowledge co-creation that are fundamentally different from those in current groupwork systems and processes. Building on two workshops hosted at ACM CSCW 2014, we will explore questions such as: How does the shift in organizational work from a closed system with known individuals, to an open and crowd model that requires engagement with an undefined network of people, affect how we conceptualize groupwork? What are the implications for the design of groupwork systems? What can the crowdsourcing research community learn from groupwork systems, or conversely what can groupwork researchers learn from crowdsourcing? How do cultures, motivations, ownership and representation fit into these systems? This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in crowdsourcing, social computing, collaborative technologies, organizational science, and workplace research, to discuss the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork with the goal of articulating an agenda for future research.

In technological development in the area of e-participation in-group equality is taken for granted. However, inequality in online communication is just as prominent as in other social contexts. To research the effects of starting from the presupposition of inequality we have developed a groupware fo