At the 6th Digital History in Sweden Conference, Orrje presented the on-going work in the project as part of his conference keynote.

Building on insights from the questions, he discussed how in recent years digital technology and the open-culture movement have profoundly changed historians’ ability to build on lay expertise. Emerging AI-based methods in turn enable us to draw on the work of even larger crowds obscured through black boxed technology. These developments could be considered the foundation of a public humanities, formed through mutually beneficial collaborations. However, such an idealistic conception risks hiding more problematic relationships of asymmetric reward structures and exploitation. In this lecture, I critically reflect on the global fiscal and moral economies of public engagement in a digital history that increasingly relies on pre-existing datasets and models. How do we create mutually beneficial collaborations if we rely on data and technology that systematically obscure the work we rely on? And finally: what are the connections between crowd sourcing and our contemporary online gig economy?