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The popularity of crowdsourcing in the GLAM sector has grown substantially since 2010 and it is remarked by researchers in the field such as Ridge (2015) and Dunn & Hedges (2017) that the communities built out of these crowds demonstrate a significant potential benefit to the sector. What is not known is the dynamics of these crowd-to-community transitions and how to sustain the development of these communities to better understand those potential benefits. This study addresses the primary question of what makes a GLAM crowd into a sustainable crowd community and secondarily how does that community benefit the relevant stakeholders involved. Using a grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis, the author conducted a series of surveys and interviews with GLAM crowdsourcing project organizers and volunteers and additionally conducted field research creating a digital archive with volunteers in charge of the direction and process to be undertaken. By applying a Social Learning Theory lens to the relationships between stakeholders, this study concludes that the primary factors in community sustainability are a series of social pressures that rely on balancing power, control, and engagement between stakeholders. This study provides guidance on the impact of volunteer training, compensation, socialization, and engagement with new technology on creating a sense of empowerment among community members leading to more sustainable engagement. Further, this study also analyses the key role of community management for institutions and how they can foster that same sense of empowerment in order to build up more balanced and sustainable relationships between themselves and volunteers. These practices will help institutions to better understand sustainable communities and the benefits to institutional goals.

This is an ethnographic study of digital humanists. As of writing, this remains the only long-term participant ethnographic study of a Digital Humanities centre. It draws upon traditional fieldwork methodologies, as well as virtual ethnographic techniques, in order to construct a complex portrait of the work and relations of a DH centre (the University of Victoria's Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory). With respect to traditional fieldwork, I became a member of the ETCL from 2017-2019. In this, I was embedded with the Lab's technical staff, and was able to observe its relationships in this capacity. With respect to virtual ethnography, I have gathered extensive data from Twitter - examining conference networks and other engagements in which the Lab's members feature - and have used this data to augment the analysis of research and administrative practices in the Lab. While such engagement with social media is now common in other disciplines, it remains particularly meaningful to the DH community, where many conferences will host pre-conference sessions to introduce Twitter to newcomers and others still will appoint "Twitter chairs" to ensure that there is a bridge between virtual discussions and conference panels. In light of this, and as part of creating a comprehensive understanding of a given DH community, it is essential, in the Age of the Internet, to consider where a community locates itself - be that in virtual or material space. As anthropologists Heather Horst and Daniel Miller (2012) observe: "... the digital, as all material culture, is more than a substrate; it is becoming a constitutive part of what makes us human". In this thesis, I explore not only the ETCL, but the virtual communities that have arisen on Twitter around the Lab-organised Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I have endeavoured to use both my physical and virtual observations to provide rich context for an exploration of the social, cultural, and academic forces at work at the ETCL. Beyond this, I have worked to relate these findings to other ethnographic work in DH, in order to discuss the forces that are influencing the field by shaping the spaces where its work is carried out. Finally, this thesis pays considerable attention to the long tail of the "hack vs. yack" debate that has been common in the Digital Humanities over the last decade. This debate, and the negotiations that many labs and practitioners have made in light of it, is particularly important to forming an understanding of research labs like the ETCL. It is hoped that this work will further the understanding of a young, dynamic field that has attracted considerable attention in recent years.

This research analyses the changes brought about by digital technologies in the ethics of oral history. These technologies greatly enhance the visibility and use of audiovisual archives such as oral history interviews. Yet, the new scale of creation and potential access to personal stories, combined with contradictory regulations, create competing expectations. Ethical difficulties around consent, privacy and misuse of information are amplified. My thesis unpacks these tensions and assesses their novelty in the digital context. I also analyse the current strategies used by interviewers and archive custodians to address these difficulties. My work concludes with recommendations for practitioners, their employers and professional associations. My research methodology is interdisciplinary, comparative and empirical. I developed my project by surveying the academic literature across four disciplines: Oral History, Digital Humanities, Information and Computer Ethics, and Legal Studies. I researched the practices of interviewers and curators working in the 2000s and 2010s in archive centres, libraries, museums and charities or as independent interviewers, with a focus on the United Kingdom, the United States and France. My research fieldwork enabled me to collect two types of primary sources - survey responses and research interviews - which together gathered the experiences of 126 practitioners who faced these tensions when creating or looking after oral history recordings. To complement these first-hand accounts, I reviewed and compared technical and guidance documents produced in three areas: oral history; archives, data management and data protection; and the Social Sciences. The analysis of this grey literature helped me to critically and constructively assess the information available to the professionals I was studying. The analysis of my primary sources focused on the interview lifecycle and on how information is handled between its creation and its reception. In particular, I drew on Privacy Studies, Information Ethics and Nissenbaum's (2010) framework to examine how oral history interviews flow as 'private in public information' and are made even more public as a result of digital, and particularly online, dissemination. This approach led me to focus on the situational dimension of the difficulties of digital oral history. I show the importance of examining the context of each interview, collections or project to understand the reactions to changes in technologies, practices and expectations. The widespread availability of digital technologies is creating new opportunities in terms of better discoverability, organisation and preservation of information, but these changes are also triggering concerns about privacy, decontextualisation, datafication and increased distance from sources and research participants. In my work, I have observed the effect of these aspects on the democratisation of knowledge, as an objective pursued by both oral historians and digital humanists, and how this process is to some extent hindered by digital technologies. This has led me to highlight the tension between the openness and quality of the historical sources created by interviewers and curators. As a result, my main findings deal with the multiple influences of digital technologies on oral history creation and curation. The increase in publicness created by digital dissemination practices and expectations amplifies existing privacy worries. Two key ethical norms for dealing with oral history interviews are respect of interviewees' informational privacy and decisional privacy; these norms are being challenged by the (new) norm of broad and fast dissemination. To alleviate these tensions, I developed the concept of 'plural privacy', which enables to take into account the diversity of stakeholders and risks associated with the increased visibility of interviews. Based on this concept, I show how the ethical, legal and curatorial issues of digital oral history could be better prepared for and anticipated.

The museum visit is a constructed relationship that occurs each time a visitor enters a museum, and it is situated in a dynamic, ever-shifting physical, socio-cultural context. Using mobile contextual technologies, museums have developed various approaches towards digital narratives for museum visits, from action-based spatial storytelling to single-node/sequential narratives. All these approaches stem from the spatial qualities of the museums, of their being integrated narrative environments where stories are told into space. However, the adoption of contextual technologies to favour the narrative construction of visitors poses a set of new questions, which my thesis aims to answer: What narrative(s) are museums creating? What are their relationships with the physical nature of museums? What is their role in the overall museum ecosystem? How do visitors use them to construct their own narrative? To answer these questions, my thesis has analysed two examples of museum digital narratives in Milan: Di Casa in Casa Chatbot and the Museum of Augmented Urban Art (MAUA). The first case study is a chatbot-based treasure hunt that connects three house museums and one park, narrating the original role of the museums as houses but also connecting them with the city. However, the three museums have entirely different approaches and displays: from the Bagatti Valsecchi, where object itineraries are secondary to the personal narrative of the family who collected them, to the Poldi Pezzoli, where the house was almost completely lost due to the bombing in 1943, to Boschi Di Stefano, where the museum flyers and the volunteers' introduction to the museum convey the idea of the museum as house and clash with the chronological display. The second one is a selection of 50 street art examples by schools and developers, which has been reinterpreted through Augmented Reality (AR), creating paths and guided tours within five neighbourhoods and narrating their stories. In this case, the concepts of physical and digital are taken to the extreme: the MAUA is at the same time a digital museum, with a collection of AR artworks, which can be triggered by physical artworks/their pictures, and anecomuseum/art gallery, deeply embedded in the neighbourhoods. It also presents contrasting narratives between the AR artworks, the street art artworks, the birth of the museum, and the story of the neighbourhoods, which require different approaches and media. To research these case studies, I have adopted both the traditional research methods used in museum studies (e.g. staff interviews, visitor interviews, ethnographic observations, exhibition analysis), but also, due to their narrative structure, which goes beyond the single museum, I used deep mapping as a frame to study the multiple narratives that are woven within the museum environment and social networks. This gave me the possibility to consider the various contexts that come into play during the museum visit and their relationships with each other. To understand what narratives the museums construct and use what type of media, I have analysed catalogues, panels, and labels. This first phase gave me an idea of how the museums' physical space is structured and what kind of narrative it proposed. In the second phase, I interviewed the staff to understand what narratives they propose, how these narratives relate to the socio-cultural context and specifically how and if the digital place the museums create is shaped by them. A third phase has considered observations inside the museums to understand how the visitors constructed their narratives within the physical nature of the museum and how the narrative conveyed by the museum influenced the visits. To clarify this point, I have analysed social media platform posts and TripAdvisor reviews. Interviewing the visitors also helped to clarify their narratives, and specifically how they construct them using contextual technologies, both during guided and nonguided experiences.