Dan Cohen
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The Spider and the Web: What Is This?

In 1882, a young anthropologist from Washington, D.C., went west to collect objects for the Smithsonian. He found this object buried in a small hill in St. Clair county, Illinois. It’s about three inches (8 cm) across, and seems to be made of a shell. It has two holes in it.

Confused about what this was, the anthropologist brought the object back and presented it colleagues. I would like to reproduce that activity digitally by presenting the object online, to see what readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter can make of it, individually and by talking to each other. Although you can post some conjectures in the comments on the blog, if you’re reading this at 3p Eastern/Noon Pacific/20:00 GMT on Thursday, April 16, 2009, please post ideas via Twitter by @ replying to me or by using the hashtag #digdil09. You only have one hour.

I’ll be posting the full results of this experiment in this space in a day or two.

So: What is this?

http://www.dancohen.org/images/what_is_this.jpg

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Crowdsourcing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 Responses to “The Spider and the Web: What Is This?”

  1. Deirdre said on April 16th, 2009 at 4:37 pm

    It’s Grandmother Spider, the goddess of weavers in the Southwest
  2. Crowdsourcing library scavenger hunt « Feral Librarian said on April 16th, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    [...] spent the second part of the morning participating via Twitter in Dan Cohen’s Twitter Mystery experiment in crowdsourcing. Dan posted an image of an object and asked “What [...]
  3. chris forster » Blog Archive » Dan Cohen’s #DigDil09 Puzzle, or The Crowd versus Search said on April 16th, 2009 at 6:58 pm

    [...] are available on his blog. But those who visit the link will be presented with an image of what looks like a piece of [...]
  4. chris g said on April 16th, 2009 at 9:45 pm

    Too late to twitter this, but that’s a gorget.
  5. Collaborative reference via Twitter hashtag « Feral Librarian said on April 17th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    [...] twitter by Chris As I think more about the experience of playing along with @dancohen’s Twitter Mystery game, it occurs to me that this was a great example of collaborative reference. The question was a great [...]
  6. Scholarly Crowdsourcing: Twitter Does History | David S. Bill IV said on April 17th, 2009 at 5:20 pm

    [...] @dancohen.  Cohen wanted to see if his Twitter and blog followers could determine what the object, shown above, was within one [...]
  7. Sterling Fluharty said on April 20th, 2009 at 9:09 pm

    Did any of your tweeters or audience members think of using this type of tool?

    http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
  8. indicommons» Blog Archive » Carnival of the Commons: around the world, and beyond said on April 24th, 2009 at 9:04 am

    [...] The Spider and the Web: an online experiment by Dan Cohen. He posts an item from the Smithsonian Institution to Twitter, asking for it to be identified. I’m anxious to see the results. [...]
  9. Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog » Blog Archive » The Spider and the Web: Results said on April 30th, 2009 at 11:17 am

    [...] CV    30 April 2009 « The Spider and the Web: What Is This? [...]
  10. Digital Campus » Interview With Stan Katz said on April 30th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

    [...] links mentioned on the podcast: Crowdsourcing on Twitter The Twitter Revolution That [...]
  11. Empowered by Ideas » Planning for a New Semester said on November 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    [...] Dan Cohen creative problem solving with Twitter [...]
  12. Playing to Learn - ProfHacker.com said on February 22nd, 2010 at 11:01 am

    [...] in which he asked his Twitter followers and blog readers to identify an artifact.  (Part one and two.) In classes where everyone has an iPod, I’ll sometimes do an in-class version of [...]

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