News

A worldwide hunt for missing information

Published 21 February 2013

The University of Brighton has been awarded £40,000 to help develop a crowd sourcing game that will enlist users round the world in the hunt for missing information on cultural artefacts.

Internet crowd-sourcing projects in the past have asked the public to help classify galaxies from space photographs and to transcribe weather observations from old ship logs to support climate research.

The new project sees the university working in collaboration with the Museum of Design in Plastics at Arts University Bournemouth and Adaptive Technologies, a Hove-based company which makes websites and web applications for museums, galleries, archives and community groups in the UK and abroad.

They are developing an FBI-style game called Ten Most Wanted which combines a Wanted poster with mobile and social gaming to encourage users to find information on plastic artefacts.

Objects in the Ten Most Wanted list are selected by the museum curators and they will be replaced with new challenges once the missing information is found and verified. Players collaborate through the game platform and social channels, where they also can communicate with curators.

One example of a plastic artefact featured in the game is the pink travel toothbrush. It is considered well suited for crowd-sourcing because many people have owned one and may know something about it such as: the shop where they bought it; the shop may have records of the wholesale trader, the wholesale trader might know who manufactured it and the manufacturer may know who designed it.

The researcher on the project Dr Lyn Pemberton, a reader from the university's School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, said: "It's this kind of detective work we're trying to engage people in."

Research fellow at the school, Marcus Winter, is working full-time on the project. He said: "In addition to having artefacts explained just by experts, this encourages players of the game to draw on personal experience to tell the experts what they know about the artefacts and why they are important. Using the Ten Most Wanted concept makes it more fun."

Marcus Winter and Lyn Pemberton with a plastic artefact, a Brownie camera.

The project's funding, which totals £120,000, comes from the Digital R&D Forum, a partnership between the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Marcus said: "It was chosen for funding because of its great potential to benefit the wider arts sector: While the developed game involves details of plastic artefacts, the approach and methodology can be easily rolled out to other materials and contexts, such as identifying people and places in paintings and photographs, recording public narratives around historic buildings and monuments, or gathering back stories of poster campaigns."

The Ten Most Wanted project starts in May with the game expected to go live in October.