ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the uses of crowdsourcing, and examines emerging trends within crowdsourcing, to understand better how wider communities can collaborate with academia to create information and knowledge, and to examine issues that are raised by these practices. It examines the role of crowd decision making from citizen science to humanities crowdsourcing, which provokes the key question as to how learning works in relation to 'crowd wisdom'. The ability to work with primary documentary sources is of course a key research skill of the historian and one that is explicitly addressed in university-level education. Two crowdsourcing projects in recent years have contributed significantly to the prominence of transcription in this field: Transcribe Bentham and Old Weather. The aim of Transcribe Bentham was to encourage volunteers to transcribe and, more generally, engage with unpublished manuscripts by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham.
