RASPBERRY PI

HUSH! HISTORIANS AT PLAYNewsWHAT IS CROWDSOURCING?Sometimes a task needs doing that would be toocostly, too unmanageable and too time-sapping ifit involved hired, paid help to work on it full-time.Rather than abandon all hope, many individuals andorganisations have turned to the power of the crowd.By spreading out tedious work among large groupsof people, each of whom can operate whenever theyhave a spare moment, the idiom ‘many hands makelight work’ becomes true. There are many examplesof successful crowdsourcing, including Wikipediaand JustGiving. A branch called crowdfundingenables ideas to get off the ground by collectingsmall amounts of money from many individuals.This is seen to great effect on Kickstarter.taking food anywhere near thebooks in the British Library,he retired to the lobby for asandwich. There, he noticed lotsof scholars doing the same, eachstaring off into the distance.“It’s unproductive downtimereally,” he says. “I realised thatno one was using the time tocontribute to crowdsourcinginitiatives. And yet, my fellowlunch-eaters were exactly the typegame was really just a matter oftrying to come up with a way toget people to go play with it.”The project could save theBritish Library a lot of time. Theimages that will be organisedwere extracted automaticallyfrom digitised books from the19th century, but it is difficult forresearchers to know what theseimages are or what they represent.“It makes it incredibly difficult togames we put on there,” explainsBen. “We’re not just trackingwhat they end up doing, but howclose they get to the machine,whether they poke at the glass,how long they stand there, and soon. We’ll be doing this by usingpressure and other basic sensors,certainly not by videoing orrecording audio.”Still, the project is in its veryearly stages, with British LibraryAbove left AdamCrymble came upwith the idea duringa lunch breakThe machines will be 1980s-style cabinets withheavy-duty buttons and joysticks, but they willhave fewer cigarette stains and garish coloursof people these crowdsourcinginitiatives are targeting:they’re scholars, interested incontributing to the greater good,and they’ve got a few minutesto spare.”Adam realised that, despitethe internet being awash withcrowdsourcing projects, theirubiquity meant they had atendency to be ignored duringperiods of inactivity. “It occurredto me that we couldn’t expectpeople to go to the crowdsourcingproject; we had to bring it to themand put it right in front of theirnoses in places where they’resitting around with time to kill.The idea to make it into an arcadefind an image that’s relevant toyour needs,” says Ben O’Steen.“It’s like finding a needle in ahaystack. By using these gamesand the help of the players toclassify the material, this give usa much better idea of what is inthis collection.”At the same time, the arcademachines will give the researchersa strong idea about how peopleplay. British Library Labs willmonitor how visitors use themachine, such as whether theystand and watch, or push on theglass and ignore the joystick.“We want to see whether peopleunderstand what the box is andwhether they use it to play theLabs finalising its plans for therest of the year. “We’re dealingwith the immense amount ofbridge-building and bureaucracythat this will entail,” says Ben.Yet they have already settledon the hardware and they havea working setup on Ben’s desk:a Raspberry Pi 2 with arcadecontrols. “I am just working onthe code to log interactions suchas pressure sensors on the glassand activity in-game,” he adds.The games for the machineare being created with Phaser.io,a desktop and mobile frameworkwhich is designed for buildingHTML5-based games. TheRaspberry Pi 2 can handle this,raspberrypi.org/magpi August 20159