Citizen Scholars
Facebook and the Co-creation of Knowledge
Amanda Grace Sikarskie
Doing historical research and writing on Facebook or Twitter may still seem like a strange notion to some. Social networks once had a reputation as frivolous spaces in which young people entered into and out of romantic relationships faster than one can click the “like” button and where “older” people (read “over 25”) posted incessantly about the rare finds they made at the local organic farmer's market and consumed in their latest meal. While these uses of social media have not gone away (stop telling me about your arugula!), the value of social media sites such as Facebook for historians, both academics and those outside academia, has become increasingly apparent. This essay seeks to present and contextualize the role of the lay historian—what I am calling the “citizen scholar”1—in the production of historical research and writing through social media.
In her 2011 blog post “More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History,” Elissa Frankle wrote, “In the history museum of the future, curators' work will be driven by our audiences' curiosity, and their preference for inquiry over certainty.”2 This growing preference for inquiry over certainty, for co-creation of content rather than consumption of content, is the basis of citizen scholarship in social media. Through the lens of a case study of interactions with citizen scholars on Facebook, I seek to illustrate the small yet profound ways in which lay historians are crowdsourcing the production of historical knowledge.
Connecting through “Quilts of the Day”
I am currently a faculty member in public history at Western Michigan University. Previously, from 2008 to 2011, I worked as a doctoral research assistant for the Quilt Index, a digital repository providing preservation and access to images and metadata for over 50,000 quilts.3 In addition to my regular work, I also managed the project's social media campaign, including a Twitter feed, a blog, a wiki, and our most popular social media channel, a fan page on Facebook.4
As of this writing, in January 2012, the Facebook fan page has over 2,250 fans, most of whom seem to be middle-aged to older women who are either hobbyist quiltmakers or self-styled lay quilt historians, though we do, of course, have many fans who do not meet this description. It is a geographically diverse group, with around 20 percent of our fans living outside the United States, in such far-flung places as Ethiopia and Pakistan, and with huge followings in Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.5
The Quilt Index social media strategy on Facebook includes engaging with the audience via trivia questions, which are designed to foster a personal connection to content, and by posting a “Quilt of the Day” daily. Themes for the Quilt of the Day (a particular pattern, period, region, etc.) are often suggested by the fans themselves. I facilitated this collective curatorial choice by posing several similar options the week before and inviting fans to use the comment feature to make their choice. For example, in July 2010, I asked the audience to choose from among five “quilt-specific” fabric colors (each of which are very much rooted in specific historical periods): cheddar orange, chocolate brown, indigo blue, Nile green, and Turkey red.
Negotiating this mass curatorial process and engaging in the co-creation of knowledge with the audience on Facebook has been fascinating. On several occasions, fans have demonstrated strong historical knowledge of a particular historical period or type of quilt or have even suggested ways in which a quilt's metadata record might be more complete. This has then prompted me and other Quilt Index staff to do additional research and post the findings. Comments posted on the Quilt Index Facebook page often provide obscure information about pattern origins and early or out-of-print publications.
Citizen Scholars and Collective Knowledge
One out-of-print publication that we learned more about through our Facebook page is Roderick Kiracofe's Homage to Amanda.6 In June 2011, I posted a Quilt of the Day and noted in my post that according to the quilt's metadata record, the quilt had been published in a book called Homage to Amanda. I inquired if anyone had ever heard of it, and several people reported that they had, including the author of the book, who happened to be our fan. The author even offered to send me a free copy of the book, as it is out of print. Skeptics might argue that those with such historical knowledge to share are the exception, rather than the rule, and that the majority of those on the Quilt Index Facebook page are there just to look at quilts or because they simply wanted more pages to “like.” Indeed, many of our fans do come to the page to self-identify with a quilt-related community or to gain intellectual or emotional uplift from the quilts (both of which are worthy outcomes as well), rather than to engage in some form of knowledge production.
Referring to the dynamic of a teacher and student (or a Facebook manager and Facebook fan) is perhaps a more apt way of describing the work we are doing on Facebook with this population of “self-identifiers.” However, even this top-down model of scholarly communication is still a process of co-creation of knowledge to an extent. As Elissa Frankle noted,
In the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle and a well-researched, well-policed Wikipedia, museums like to believe that we still have the advantage of being Authorities. We know how to do Research. We know how to pose the Right Questions. We know, most importantly, how to Give Our Visitors The Answers. Citizen History is an experiment in finding out what happens if we trust our visitors enough to allow them to bring their diverse perspectives and boundless enthusiasm into the research work of the museum and share our authority…. Citizen History opens up a museum's existing data to participants and, through scaffolded inquiry, invites participants to draw conclusions to answer big questions.7
This sort of “scaffolded inquiry,”8 which allows for a sharing but not a relinquishing of authority, provides a space in which those who might be better defined as simply citizens, rather than citizen scholars, can still work alongside us.
The Quilt Index fan page does have several individuals who are clearly visiting the fan page for the purpose of participation in research. In fact, one of our fans in Pakistan (another indicator of the very international nature of this scholarly exchange) alerted me that a ralli quilt9 that I had posted during “International Week” had an incorrect provenance. According to its donor-submitted metadata, the quilt was made in India. However, the fan argued that it was actually made in Pakistan. I was later able to do some research to prove the fan's assertion, resulting in the updating of the quilt's record. (See the image in the web version of this essay at http://WritingHistory.trincoll.edu.)
Taken together, these short anecdotes on co-curating Quilts of the Day, crowdsourcing the ralli quilt record, and connecting with the author of Homage to Amanda (culled from numerous examples of such interactions on the Quilt Index Facebook page) may be understood in the context of what cybertheorist Pierre Lévy termed “collective intelligence.” In Cyberculture, Lévy describes the collective intelligence brought about by online communication.
My hypothesis is that cyberculture reinstates the copresence of messages and their context, which had been the current of oral societies, but on a different scale and on a different plane. The new universality no longer depends on self-sufficient texts, on the fixity and independence of signification. It is constructed and extended by interconnecting messages with one another, by their continuous ramification through virtual communities, which instills in them varied meanings that are continuously renewed.10
One can understand the collective intelligence of lay scholars' crowdsourcing of history in this way: no one historian knows everything, and everyone actively posting content has something slightly different to offer the community. All of the content produced and posted by lay quilt scholars amounts to the collective intelligence of the quilt world, a body of knowledge that no one individual can ever know in its entirety, for it is simply too vast. Collectively, these social citizen scholars have created a massive, fairly cohesive body of knowledge online. I see this collaborative, corporate way of producing and sharing knowledge as a new genre of historical writing and research,11 a genre that challenges but need not overthrow traditional academic assumptions about single authorship and the roles of lay scholars.
Social media shifts the role of authority from being vested solely in a historical cultural domain, such as the museum or the university history department, to being shared with a community- or user-generated body of information that is critiqued within the community. Academic historians are beginning to recognize that this outpouring of lay scholarship on Facebook and through other social media outlets is neither to be ignored nor to be feared. The ability of citizen scholars to engage in historical inquiry on Facebook pages such as the Quilt Index's fan page is strengthening, rather than eroding, the connection between lay historians and museum professionals and other academics. In fact, I myself (an academic historian) have cited Facebook comments before. Facebook is challenging the traditional channels of scholarly communication, and crowdsourcing is changing the way in which I approach the writing of history.
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to my colleagues at the Quilt Index—Marsha MacDowell, Mary Worrall, Justine Richardson, and Amy Milne—for their help and guidance with this project. I also very much thank those who provided comments and questions during the open peer review, especially Timothy Burke, Bethany Nowviskie, and Barbara Rockenbach. A big thank-you goes to Beth Donaldson, herself a lay quilt historian, who recently took over for me as Quilt Index social media manager after I accepted my current faculty position.
Notes
1. In this essay, the terms lay scholar, lay historian, and citizen scholar are all used more or less interchangeably, to indicate someone who produces (historical) scholarship without having attained a postbaccalaureate academic degree, the MA or PhD in history or a related discipline. These terms are all used to contrast such scholars to the academic historian, who possesses such a credential and often works within a university or museum setting. When used on its own in this essay, the term scholar refers simply to a person who participates in historical research and writing.
2. Elissa Frankle, “More Crowdsourced Scholarship: Citizen History,” blog of the Center for the Future of Museums, July 28, 2011, http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-crowdsourced-scholarship-citizen.html.
3. The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org) is a partnership project between Michigan State University's MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, the Michigan State University Museum, and the Alliance for American Quilts. It has been funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
4. Quilt Index Twitter feed, http://www.twitter.com/quiltindex; blog, http://www.quiltindex.org/news; wiki page, http://www.quiltindex.org/~quilti/wiki/index.php/Main_Page; Facebook fan page, http://www.facebook.com/quiltindex.
5. Statistics and countries given are according to Insights, Facebook's internal analytics application for managers of fan pages.
6. Roderick Kiracofe, Homage to Amanda: Two Hundred Years of American Quilts (San Francisco: R K Press, 1984).
7. Frankle, “More Crowdsourced Scholarship.”
8. In learning theory, the term scaffolded inquiry refers to a social constructivist idea in which learning is facilitated by a framework, or scaffold, constructed by the content expert. Scaffolded inquiry can also facilitate collaboration with peers.
9. Ralli quilts are a traditional form of quilted patchwork produced in Pakistan and northwestern India.
10. Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiv.
11. Bethany Nowviskie, comment on Amanda Grace Sikarskie, “Citizen Scholars,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, web-book ed., Fall 2011 version.
