Making Space to Talk

A Hybrid Approach to People-Powered Research

Authors

  • Dr Lynn Wray University of Leeds
  • Dr Alex Fitzpatrick Science Museum Group
  • Dr Samantha Blickhan Adler Planetarium
  • Dr Geoffrey Belknap National Museums Scotland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v24i1.4775

Abstract

Communities & Crowds is an AHRC-funded (2021-24) collaborative project between volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, National Museum of Scotland, and Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium, Chicago. The Communities & Crowds team used an action research approach to test out how local in-person volunteer researchers might be supported within a cultural heritage institution (CHI) to lead the development and creation of a crowdsourcing project relevant to their own interests and aspirations. 

In this article we use the Communities & Crowds experiments at the National Science and Media Museum as a case study to draw out how co-creation and action research can be brought together with online crowdsourcing to enrich volunteering experiences and institutional knowledge about GLAM photographic collections. We argue that the careful co-creation of bespoke spaces for conversation and critical reflection were essential to the successful realisation of an online crowdsourcing project on the platform Zooniverse. 

Author Biographies

Dr Lynn Wray, University of Leeds

Dr Lynn Wray is a visual artist, curator and researcher of visual culture based in the School of Media and Communication at University of Leeds. She does interdisciplinary, practice-based and participatory research concerned with how stories are told, made visible and amplified. This has included co-curating Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making (Tate Liverpool, 2013-2014) and Above the Noise: Fifteen Stories from Bradford (National Science and Media Museum, 2019). Her current research is focussed on exploring how invisible and complex processes and systemic issues can be articulated through visual media and sequential drawing. She is Co-Investigator on Communities & Crowds.

Dr Alex Fitzpatrick, Science Museum Group

Dr Alex Fitzpatrick is currently the Research Fellow in Digital Participation for the Congruence Engine project, based at the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom. Her research is focused on developing what community participation and contribution to a national collection may entail, following up on her previous participatory action research work on the Communities & Crowds project at the National Science and Media Museum. 

Dr Samantha Blickhan, Adler Planetarium

Dr Samantha Blickhan is Co-Director and Humanities Lead for the Zooniverse.org crowdsourcing platform. She guides the strategic vision for Zooniverse Humanities efforts, manages development of new tools and resources, and produces original research. Her work has been supported by funding from the IMLS, NEH, NSF, ACLS, and AHRC. She is co-I of the Collective Wisdom project, which produced The Collective Wisdom Handbook, an authoritative book on the ‘state of the art’ in cultural heritage crowdsourcing, in 2021. She is Co-Principal Investigator of Communities & Crowds.

Dr Geoffrey Belknap, National Museums Scotland

Dr Geoffrey Belknap is Keeper of Science at Technology at National Museums Scotland. He is a historian of photography, science and visual culture in the 19th century and a museum professional with particular interests in participatory practice and digital humanities. Between 2017-2022 he was Curator of Photography and Photographic Technology, and later Head Curator, at the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM). His first monograph, From a Photograph, was published in 2016 with Bloomsbury Press on the history of photography in 19th periodical publication. He  is Co-Principal Investigator of Communities & Crowds.

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Published

22.05.2026

How to Cite

Wray, L. M., Fitzpatrick, A., Blickhan, S., & Belknap, G. (2026). Making Space to Talk: A Hybrid Approach to People-Powered Research . Museum & Society, 24(1), 109–130. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v24i1.4775

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 1 (2026): Museum & Society: Open Issue

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Dr Lynn Wray, Dr Alex Fitzpatrick, Dr Samantha Blickhan, Dr Geoffrey Belknap

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Copyright remains with the author(s) of the article. This article can be re-used according to the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0  licence.