WORK IN PROCESS - NOT YET PUBLISHED

In this third part of the "FactMiners and the Participatory History Commons" we identify two significant ways that the FactMiners platform will explicitly support and amplify the quality and quantity of Citizen Scientist and Citizen Historian contributions to the Participatory History Commons.

We characterize our first innovation as "piercing the veil" as we strive to provide easy-to-use tools -- such as the FactMiners Fact Cloud Wizard -- to take crowdsource microtasks into the realm of modeling and 'fact mining' the "inner space" or representational meaning of textual and image-based digital collection artifacts.

The second area of FactMiners innovation is about "moving the bar" for what Mia Ridge has characterized as the distinction between professional historian activities and the microtasks of crowdsourced non-professional volunteers within the Participatory History Commons.

In the fourth and final post in this series, 'The FactMiners Green Field in the Participatory History Commons', I'll examine the unique opportunity for FactMiners and The Softalk Apple Project to serve as a 'means-focused' innovation hub while generating its own (ends-based) unique contribution of new data to the History of Science and Technology domain.