CAREER: Transforming Investigative Science and Practice with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This research will create an innovative sociotechnical infrastructure that embodies expert-led crowdsourcing and use it as a testbed to conduct a series of mixed-methods studies around three major themes: effectiveness, ethics, and efficiency, in the domains of history, journalism, and national security, respectively. As more information sources have come online, thousands of amateur sleuths collaborate on websites to investigate for themselves. Some crowdsourced investigations have yielded remarkable success, helping to catch criminals and locate missing persons. Other well-intentioned efforts have ended in failure or disaster, and digital vigilantism is on the rise. There is an urgent need for research informed by scientific, technical, and social computing perspectives to shape the future of crowdsourced investigations as a force for societal good. This need can be addressed with expert-led crowdsourcing, a novel approach to investigation that leverages the complementary strengths of experts and crowds to achieve greater results than either could alone. The outreach efforts will bring new tools and techniques to professional and amateur investigators online and in workshops. The educational activities will train diverse groups of students to leverage cutting-edge investigative technologies and big data to answer pressing societal questions. This research will transform the science of investigation in multiple domains by synthesizing concepts and techniques from social computing and crowdsourcing that have mostly been overlooked. For each of the three themes, the research will study expert investigators, extend the infrastructure's support for expert-crowd interaction, and evaluate the benefits of the infrastructure on a series of photo investigation tasks. Rigorous studies of current expert investigations will generate rich findings about current practice and distill design considerations. This research will also introduce the novel approach of expert-led crowdsourcing to overcome the cognitive and resource limits of individual experts and the effectiveness, ethics, and efficiency challenges to crowds. The new platform will make concrete the ideas behind expert-led crowdsourcing and provide a site for evaluation studies that generate foundational knowledge and broader principles of online collaboration and collaborative discovery.