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Wherever I Lay My Hat is Home?: A Complex Case Study of Crowd-Sourcing, Coordination, and Cross-Platform Integration for Hosting Open Humanities Data Cover

Wherever I Lay My Hat is Home?: A Complex Case Study of Crowd-Sourcing, Coordination, and Cross-Platform Integration for Hosting Open Humanities Data

By: Mark Gotham  
Open Access
|Mar 2026

Abstract

We consider the relative (de-)merits of various platforms for those involved in creating, coordinating, and disseminating open humanities data, including Wikidata. We focus this discussion on the complex case of the ‘OpenScore’ initiative which creates digital encodings of musical scores under the CC0 licence for all use cases (musical, academic, and more). These corpora have traced a complex journey from crowd-sourcing to a multi-platform offering as they seek to serve those multiple users as effectively and openly as possible. This paper tells the full story of how platform choice interacts with stakeholders and use cases, culminating in the announcement of a new series of bespoke websites at ‘Four Score and More’.1 We focus on this specific story for depth and detail, and with the conviction that this case has wider significance and lessons for all involved in meaningful development of open data.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.456 | Journal eISSN: 2059-481X
Language: English
Submitted on: Nov 3, 2025
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Accepted on: Jan 18, 2026
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Published on: Mar 9, 2026
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 Mark Gotham, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.