Neal Ungerleider (@nealunger on Twitter) writes for Fast Company about Redditors’ efforts in sleuthing crowdsourced information on the Boston Marathon bombing suspects in the attached link. Notable is Ungerleider’s cautious balance in critiquing the motivations of participants and the utility of crowdsourcing information at an event.

In exploring the behavior on this subreddit, a pertinent takeaway from this situation emerges: crowdsourcing in investigative situations is best for gathering data (that can be used by analysts to offset more specific intelligence) but becomes unreliable and even dangerous as misinformation if participants are given space to assert conclusions.

Conversely, crowdsourced data, coupled with conclusions, can be helpful for cultural heritage projects like the ones on which I am working; in these situations, we may have serendipitous moments of discovery in relation to collections and the hidden stories of our archives. In both cases, the cautions of the Reddit case are useful considerations in understanding and relating to users/audiences.