Crowdsourced art: activating creative participation in online spaces

Recent years have seen a proliferation of artistic projects that are based on open public participation and take place entirely online. Building on the concept of crowdsourcing as a strategy for content generation, I describe such projects as online crowdsourced art. From a theoretical perspective, this research introduces a useful typology for crowdsourced art, explores its aesthetic, cultural and technological implications, and discusses the different levels of participation that crowdsourced art projects enable. As a practical application of my research, to better understand the conditions that most effectively foster creative participation online, I crowdsourced the development of a children's book about digital culture—collecting 4200 written and visual submissions on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—and determined, through large‐scale statistical analysis, the impact that key incentives have on the process of creative crowdsourcing. ❧ This work—at the intersection of communication, Internet studies, and art history—represents the first attempt to map out this emerging field, and makes a vital contribution to our understanding of online creative participation, crowdsourcing and collective creativity. The proposed reconceptualization of participatory processes (as receptive, executory and structural) enhances the current literature on online participation, facilitating a more sophisticated understanding of the ways people engage and collaborate in digital spaces. From a practical perspective, my findings help illuminate the factors that have the greatest impact on the quality and quantity of online participation, determining the role of financial rewards, bonuses, project purpose and authorship credit in creative crowdsourcing initiatives.

近年来，基于开放式公众参与且完全在线上开展的艺术项目呈爆发式增长态势。依托内容生成式众包（crowdsourcing）理念，笔者将此类项目定义为在线众包艺术。从理论层面而言，本研究为在线众包艺术构建了一套实用的分类体系，探讨其美学、文化与技术层面的意蕴，并剖析了众包艺术项目所支持的不同参与层级。作为本研究的实践应用环节，为更清晰地探明最能有效激发在线创意参与的条件，笔者通过众包方式开发了一本关于数字文化的儿童绘本——在亚马逊Mechanical Turk（Amazon Mechanical Turk）平台上收集了共计4200份文字与视觉投稿，并通过大规模统计分析，明确了核心激励因素对创意众包流程的影响。
本研究横跨传播学、互联网研究与艺术史三大领域，是首次系统梳理这一新兴领域的尝试，为我们深化对在线创意参与、众包与集体创作的认知作出了重要贡献。本次研究提出的参与式流程重构框架（分为接受型、执行型与结构型三类），完善了现有关于在线参与的研究成果，有助于更深入地理解人们在数字空间中互动与协作的方式。从实践层面而言，本研究的发现有助于阐明对在线参与的质量与数量影响最为显著的各类因素，明确了物质奖励、额外报酬、项目宗旨与作者署名在创意众包项目中的作用。