[This post is based on Mohamad Fernanda‘s Master Information Science thesis]
Cultural heritage event annotation often lacks diverse perspectives, resulting in incomplete or biased historical records. Master Information Science student Mohamad Fernanda’s research addresses that gap by examining how crowdsourcing can support polyvocality—bringing a broader range of viewpoints into the annotation process. His central research question is: How can annotations for cultural heritage events be sourced effectively and ethically to achieve polyvocality?
To explore this, he conducted a study in which he:
- gathered qualitative survey responses from 22 participants across three groups with different cultural backgrounds: a) native Dutch individuals, b) native Indonesians, and c) people of Dutch-Indonesian heritage;
- investigated how Large Language Models can recognize and synthesize polyvocal data.
The findings show that crowdsourcing can successfully capture multiple perspectives, resulting in a richer and more nuanced historical narrative. While LLMs offer promising support for analyzing such data, their use demands careful oversight and ethical consideration. Overall, this study demonstrates that a collaborative, ethically informed approach—combining crowdsourcing with LLM assistance—can help produce more balanced and representative accounts of cultural history.
The figure below shows the results of the coding done by the LLM of choice (Gemini 2.0 Flash). It recognizes five themes in the participants responses on questions about the representation of colonialism in Dutch museums:
The thesis, including the exact surveys and prompts used can be found below
