GroundTruth: Augmenting Expert Image Geolocation with Crowdsourcing and Shared Representations

Expert investigators bring advanced skills and deep experience to analyze visual evidence, but they face limits on their time and attention. In contrast, crowds of novices can be highly scalable and parallelizable, but lack expertise. In this paper, we introduce the concept of shared representations for crowd–augmented expert work, focusing on the complex sensemaking task of image geolocation performed by professional journalists and human rights investigators. We built GroundTruth, an online system that uses three shared representations—a diagram, grid, and heatmap—to allow experts to work with crowds in real time to geolocate images. Our mixed-methods evaluation with 11 experts and 567 crowd workers found that GroundTruth helped experts geolocate images, and revealed challenges and success strategies for expert–crowd interaction. We also discuss designing shared representations for visual search, sensemaking, and beyond.