Valeonti, Foteini; (2018) USEUM: Making art accessible with crowdsourcing and gamification. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

The importance of art is indisputable, however access to it remains limited. The Internet and the digitisation programmes of institutions around the world have increased access to art, enabling Internet users to view thousands of artworks. However, accessibility is defined not only as the ability to view artworks, but also to understand, appreciate and use them. The platform developed in the scope of this thesis provides access to art by taking advantage of two phenomena of the 21st Century: crowdsourcing and gamification. Crowdsourcing enables platforms with limited resources to harness the work of volunteers and drive content development, whilst gamification provides the incentive system to motivate participation. Although numerous research projects combine crowdsourcing with gamification, only a small number of them involve the fine arts. Crowdsourcing artworks raises challenges relating to copyright, but also to motivation, as contributors tend not to upload their own content. This thesis documents development of USEUM.org: an on-line art museum that enables people to view, understand, appreciate and use in numerous ways 82,000 artworks from the Renaissance until today by 10,000 artists, out of whom 1,400 are contemporary artists from 105 countries. USEUM demonstrates that an on-line platform can increase access to art by utilising crowdsourcing and gamification. This thesis shows that the area of research involving these phenomena and the accessibility of art has been understudied. The contribution of this thesis is that, by developing USEUM.org, the challenges and the benefits of utilising crowdsourcing and gamification for the fine arts are documented and recommendations are made for both current and future developments in the field, for artists, institutions, and those building online crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, this thesis contributes to insights on the impact that trends in copyright and licensing, such as the open content movement, have on the accessibility of art.

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