Crowdsourcing and Descriptions

We've all heard of crowdsourcing in the past. Groups coming together to pool resources, whether those be time, energy, knowledge, money, etc. Most of us think of things like GoFundMe, which is monetary crowdsourcing, however there is a great field of academic crowdsourcing that the average person isn't familiar.

"DescribeMe" is one of those types of websites. It's main intent is to take it's vast content of historical documents and artifacts and make them accessible to those who are blind or have low vision. The process is frankly very simple. You are presented with a picture of either a document or artifact/item and in a very short summary, you are to describe it. It sounds easy, right? And for the most part it is, however there are moments that become very difficult. When you are faced with a page that is taken out of context, with a lot of information on it that you are having to interpret, the "three to seven words" limit becomes more taxing than anything else.
It feels as though sometimes when defining things, you are out of your depth. These things may require more knowledge than you (as a non-professional) would have easy access to. This kind of issue made, at least to me, the situation a little concerning. I found myself often asking how useful my interpretations of documents were when I couldn't understand them at all myself.
But then again, maybe I was over-analyzing the purpose of the interpretations. The tricky thing about crowdsourcing like this is that it so much is up to untrained persons, that sometimes, when delicacy is required, the real use of the project may be muddled.

A Looming Look at Technology

As the first post on this blog it feels a little unceremonious to simply jump into a topic but, what is an introduction but just pandering to yourself. Which was funnily enough a topic was passed through in a recent class. That is to say, way got more than acquaintances with the ongoing "technology v. man v. millennial" debate that seems to have infected if not plagued the internet as it stands. But, anyone who's done their research can tell you this kind of debate has been going on for as long as time. Ancient Greece heard it about the development of non-legal necessary writing as opposed to oral tradition. The popularization supposedly meant the end of face to face communication, repeated again by the internet's invention, then by cellular phones. Fear of robot replacing man, too, has followed this suite. Mechanizing of factories seeded fear of job loss and anger across the world from the industrial revolution to the modern day: The cotton gin, the assembly line, automated machines, computers!

So then, not so much a question to be asked, but a strong sense of curiosity comes to me that I felt necessary to investigate. Where was the point at which the "digital" which rings in our most current fears and the "replacing mankind" vibe that follows throughout history first intersect? This is perhaps a murky question to ask, but one part which stood out to me was the development of the Jacquard Loom.

Hardly out of the 17th century, the loom made its appearance in 1801. That is to say, a power loom which through the use of interchangeable punch cards could create detailed and complex patterns during weaving. If you know anything about early computing and the development of digital technology, those "punch cards" might sound a bit familiar, but the shocking bit of it was when it was invented. It's necessity derived from a growing desire for luxury and detailed textiles, which at the time were hard to come by and offered little variety due to exclusivity and price. The Jacquard Loom brought to the forefront textiles which were cheaper to produce and more detailed at the same time, offering precision impossible in technology prior to it.

And just like it's descendants and relatives, it got quite the lash-back in its time. There are accounts on workers destroying Jacquard Looms and even attacking the inventor Joseph Jacquard himself. Many industrialists were thrilled with it's invention, seeing a brave new world to expand into as the need for accessible luxury only grew. But this was a small selection of people out of a much wider set. Echoing fears of wage cuts, personnel cuts, the ever impending robot usurpation of man.

Of course, none of that happened, and in general employment rates rose rather than fell. And if ever we needed to pay attention to history, it seems to me that we need to pay attention to it when it sounds a little bit too much like how we're acting today.

Works referenced
http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/HistoryPt2.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/jacquard.html