The Wisdom of the (In) Crowd

The Wisdom of the (In) Crowd

Photo of the word "crowd" as spelled out by people standing far away in the shape of the letters.

The "altogether now", relatively unfettered democracy of web 2.0 information sharing has given the world untold inanity (98% of what's on YouTube), obscenity (the notorious /b/ board on 4chan), and obscurity (can I do any better than the last two examples?).  But over and against all of that, there remains something of the genuinely miraculous in the crowdsourcing model, in being able to whisper a question--literally anything--into the ether and know with certainty that it will be answered in an instant.  Given that the answer may well be inane, obscene, and/or obscure, the phenomenon still falls just short of a secular version of prayers answered, but it nonetheless represents a once unimaginable improvement on your chances with the Magic 8-Ball, the sagacity of a neighbor, and even the card catalog at the community library. 

The wisdom of the crowd--whomever that may be--has been harnessed, and when we want answers in 2011, we have them.  In the best cases, those answers come from a crowd of sufficient depth, breadth, or authority to ensure some measure of accuracy and reliability.  Not all crowds are equally wise.

The community-based Q&A forum at DHAnswers is in the business of providing answers to digital humanities questions and doing so with a level of precision, expertise, and accessibility that should far exceed the utility of what you get simply typing your pressing open source historical GIS question into Google.  They aim to be the right crowd, in other words, and the site has a promising pedigree:  it's hosted by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and represents a collaboration between the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the folks at the Chronicle of Higher Ed's venerable Profhacker.

The forum has been up for several months now, and seems to be off to a good start--although it may be too early yet to judge whether the site has achieved a critical and sustaining mass of participants.  Having started with a core team of only a few admin-contributors (card-carrying digital humanists all), DHAnswers is on its way to establishing itself as a go-to source for reliable and quick answers to DH-related (largely techy) questions.  The forum currently averages a few new question threads each day, and most of the questions posed have been met with thoughtful answers from a variety of respondents.

One question that the site might inadvertently answer hasn't been asked explicitly but has been plenty buzzed and blogged about of late:  who is a digital humanist and how tight are the ranks?  The growth of DHAnswers will address itself to this question in a couple of ways.  On one hand, as the site's community grows, it will offer a somewhat quantifiable representation of a body of available expertise and experts, and on the other hand, the success of DHAnswers may speak (to a certain degree) to the engagement of the crowd (in this case, the "in" crowd of established experts or specialists in the field) with the task of reproducing itself and growing the field/community.

At the very least, DHAnswers is a useful resource well-worth bookmarking; at the other end of the possibility spectrum, the site could grow to be an important part of the community's infrastructure, giving relative newcomers access to reliable knowledge and making sure that every good question finds a good answer.