Stimulating Engagement and Learning Through Gamified Crowdsourcing : Development and Evaluation of a Digital Platform

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to develop a gamified crowdsourcing platform for transcription and metadata tagging of digitised text documents, and further to examine whether the platform can stimulate engagement in archives and be used as an educational resource. The case, around which the thesis project is conducted, is the governmental Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its historical documents which were damaged in a fire in 2014.  Theories about engagement, archival pedagogy, and gamification guided the development of the platform. Bosnian-Herzegovinian school children, History teachers, and staff of the Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina tested the platform and shared their thoughts of it in focus group discussions and interviews. The developed platform consists of a game interface, a database, and an interface for results viewing and searching. It is web-based, and coded in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. The platform stimulated engagement among the school children who tested it. They expressed interest in reading and learning more about archival documents, in long-term preservation of information, and in the archive’s mission and future. Judging from the discussions and interviews, the platform could well serve as an educational resource. The History teachers showed interest in using the platform in their teaching, and found support for it in the curriculum for the History subject. A gamified crowdsourcing platform has been developed, and the perception among school children, History teachers, and archive staff was overall very positive. Crowdsourcing is not just about sourcing out tasks to the crowd. Co-creation of content could furthermore stimulate learning and engagement, and thereby tie a bound between the public and the archive. Gamification can successfully make the overarching goal of crowdsourcing understandable and concrete for the platform users.