This chapter begins by discussing the different types and phases of crowdsourcing in terms of their possibilities for participants and problems for scholars. Forms of crowdsourcing such as volunteers’ transformation of content (existing institutional resources) and their production of new content differ from each other, and even more from projects explicitly including pedagogical aims and aspirations of co-production.

The chapter uses the example of a recent large-scale humanities research project that relied heavily on crowdsourcing, the Estoria DIgiTal (EDIT). After exploring crowdsourcing in the humanities through examining that and other projects in the cultural heritage sector, the humanities, and citizen history, the chapter moves on to themes of current relevance to public humanities and public history. It defines citizen humanities as a distinct, participatory rather than delegatory, type of project, and then discusses the impact and relevance of citizen humanities and volunteer commitment in terms of problems and possibilities. Finally, I outline the features of a citizen humanities that considers both knowledge production and the teaching of related skills.

I argue that to establish a field of genuine citizen humanities, we must learn how to teach research-related skills to participants and define transferable skills as a pedagogical outcome of such projects.