Abstract:

Due to the characteristics of its professionalism, complexity and large sample size, citizen science projects in the Digital Humanities domain have higher requirements on volunteers' abilities, skills and input efforts. Accordingly, it is essential to fully understand volunteers' motivation to participate in the sustainable development of the projects. This paper adopts the Transcribe Sheng project as a case, in which the project volunteers have been selected as interviewees, and grounded theory has been employed to explore the factors affecting volunteers' continuous intention to participate in the projects. We identified 32 initial concepts, 14 categories and corresponding 4 main categories, namely external motivation, cognitive value, emotional perception and task driving. On this basis, a conceptual model on sustained participation motivation of citizen science projects in digital humanities domain has been proposed, and corresponding incentive strategies also have been put forward. The research findings will provide theoretical contribution for volunteers' continuous participation motivation in citizen science projects in Digital Humanities, and yield some implication for the incentive design and maintenance of volunteers.

Keywords: Digital humanities, Citizen science, Motivation exploration, User incentive, Grounded theory