In the context of our ArchiMediaL project on Digital Architectural History, a number of student projects explored opportunities and challenges around enriching the colonialarchitecture.eu dataset. This dataset lists buildings and sites in countries outside of Europe that at the time were ruled by Europeans (1850-1970).

Patrick Brouwer wrote his IMM bachelor thesis “Crowdsourcing architectural knowledge: Experts versus non-experts” about the differences in annotation styles between architecture historical experts  and non-expert crowd annotators. The data suggests that although crowdsourcing is a viable option for annotating this type of content. Also, expert annotations were of a higher quality than those of non-experts. The image below shows a screenshot of the user study survey.

Rouel de Romas also looked at crowdsourcing , but focused more on the user interaction and the interface involved in crowdsourcing. In his thesis “Enriching the metadata of European colonial maps with crowdsourcing”  he -like Patrick- used the Accurator platform, developed by Chris Dijkshoorn. A screenshot is seen below.  The results corroborate the previous study that the in most cases the annotations provided by the participants do meet the requirements provided by the architectural historian; thus, crowdsourcing is an effective method to enrich the metadata of European colonial maps.