As Project Coordinator for the Smithsonian Transcription Center, Dr. Meghan Ferriter leads a program of engagement and optimizes collaborative transcription workflows. Meghan has been invited to discuss her success in establishing productive and meaningful audience experiences in the U.S. and U.K. She also helps organizations understand the ways communities form and navigate conflict; and how those groups behave as a result. She enjoys learning every day while partnering with volunteers and staff to increase access to Smithsonian Institution collections.

An anthropologist and cultural historian, Meghan's doctoral thesis explored sport media discourses and audience reception. She seeks ways to tell and create access to the stories that bring meaning to our world -- whether in shared cultural heritage, sports, or popular culture. Her recent research explores communities collaborating in digital platforms including Tumblr and Twitter and crowdsourcing and citizen science best practices, including improving the design, implementation, and calls to action for group activity in these spaces.

I volunteer for a variety of cultural heritage organisations and citizen science projects. My main focus is on transcribing documents and specimen labels for the Smithsonian Transcription Center. My passion for this activity has lead me to engage more in social media (specifically Twitter) and also to me participating in other crowdsourcing projects such as Wikipedia, Zooniverse, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and others.
As I've become more involved in assisting the Smithsonian Institution's crowdsourcing efforts, I've come to realise that everything is connected. Digitisation of natural history specimens and cultural heritage documents reach their full potential when that data is accessible in a machine readable format and then is linked between institutions and individuals.
I gain a lot of satisfaction from volunteering for crowdsourcing projects and from the friendships and knowledge gained from participating. I hope to share the perspective of one of the "crowd" when presenting our panel.