Each student will select, research, and participate in a crowd-sourcing project of their choosing.
Select a digital history project from the list below and post your choice on the class Basecamp by end of class on March 25.
No project can be selected by more than one student–whoever posts their choice on Basecamp first gets it!
Research the goals, platform, and experience of participating.
Spend one to two hours participating in the project during class on March 25 and over the next week:
- Read about the project, taking notes on its goals, and information about how the project was created and why. Post notes in Basecamp.
- Register for the project and take any tutorials needed.
- Spend about an hour volunteering for the project. Take screen shots or record snippets of your participation for your presentation.
- Note how the project treats you as a volunteer, what do they do well, how do they keep you engaged in the work.
- Present your experience as a video or slide presentation. Be sure to use screen shots and give us a feeling for the way it worked.
Please Note! If you select a project and then find that there is no work to be done, or that it is not appropriate for the task, CHOOSE ANOTHER PROJECT!
Digital History Projects
The projects listed below are suggestions– you can choose a different crowdsourcing project off this list, but insure that it has a historical bent.
If it is red – it is currently out of data.
| Digital PrOJect | Website | PITCH |
|---|---|---|
| Story Corps | http://storycorps.org | StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. |
| Decoding the Civil War | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/decoding-the-civil-war | Witness the United States Civil War by transcribing and deciphering messages and codes from the United States Military Telegraph. |
|
Measuring the ANZACs |
https://www.measuringtheanzacs.org/#/ | Do your part to help transcribe first-hand accounts of New Zealanders from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps circa World War I. |
| Shakespeare’s World | https://www.shakespearesworld.org/#/ | Transcribe handwritten documents by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and help us understand his life and times. |
| Jane Addams Papers | https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/scripto | Join our transcription crew and transcribe full documents that we have added to the collection, but not yet transcribed. This will help make them searchable and help us publish documents more quickly. |
| African American Civil War Soldiers | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/usct/african-american-civil-war-soldiers?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=announce21mar2018&utm_content=AACWS | Transcribe the military records of African American soldiers in the American Civil War. |
| AnnoTate | https://anno.tate.org.uk/#/ | Help transcribe documents from the Tate collection, and reveal the secret lives of artists. |
| Operation War Diary | https://www.operationwardiary.org/ | The story of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War is waiting to be discovered in 1.5 million pages of unit war diaries. |
| Transcribing Modern Manuscripts | http://publications.newberry.org/digital/mms-transcribe/index | Transcribing Modern Manuscripts allows users to transcribe letters, diaries, journals, and other material from the Newberry Library. . |
| Building Inspector | http://buildinginspector.nypl.org/ | Help unlock New York City’s past by identifying buildings and other details on beautiful old maps. |
| What’s on the Menu? | http://menus.nypl.org/ | We’re transcribing our historical restaurant menus, dish by dish, so that they can be searched by what people were eating back in the day |
| Map Rectifier | http://maps.nypl.org/warper/ | The NYPL Map Warper is a tool for digitally aligning historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps. Visitors can browse already rectified maps or assist the NYPL by aligning a map. |
| TranscriptEditor | http://transcribe.oralhistory.nypl.org/ | Make New York City history accessible — one story at a time! |
| Ancient Lives | http://ancientlives.org | Volunteers transcribe ancient Greek text on fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection. |
| Smithsonian Digital Volunteer | https://transcription.si.edu/ | Help us make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible. |
| Scotus Notes | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/scotus-notes-behind-the-scenes-at-supreme-court-conference | We need your help transcribing the handwritten conference notes left by Supreme Court justices. Your transcriptions will provide unprecedented access to the justices’ conversations in thousands of Court decisions. |
| National Archives Citizen Archivist | http://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/ | One day all of our records will be online. You can help make it happen. |
| Papers of the War Department | http://wardepartmentpapers.org/ | Help transcribe documents from the archive! |
| Notes From Nature | https://www.notesfromnature.org/ | Transcribe museum records |
| Old Weather | https://www.oldweather.org/ | Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations recorded in ship’s logs since the mid-19th century. |
| Transcribe Bentham | http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/2013/03/27/welcome-to-transcribe-bentham-2/ | This is an exciting opportunity to make a genuine difference to research and scholarship by contributing to the production of the new edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, and to help create for posterity a vast digital repository of Bentham’s writings. |
| Billion Graves | https://billiongraves.com/ | BillionGraves is the world′s largest resource for searchable GPS cemetery data, and is growing bigger and better every day. You can help by collecting headstone images from local and other cemeteries, and then by transcribing the personal information found on the images. |
| FamilySearch | https://familysearch.org/indexing/ | Everyone deserves to be remembered and you can help make this possible. No special skills or time commitments are required. Together, we can help people from around the world find and trace their ancestry for free. |
| The Louisville Leader | http://digital.library.louisville.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/leader/ | Automated programs have difficulty transcribing faded, torn, or misaligned text, even when they are readable to the human eye. With your help, we can create full-text transcriptions of these articles, making them easily searchable. |
| Virginia Chronicle | http://virginiachronicle.com/ | Correct OCR of digitized Virginia newspapers. |
| Transcribe Scotland’s Places | http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/transcribe | Encourages members of the public to help create transcriptions of various resources in the website. |
| Letters of 1916-1923 | http://letters1916.maynoothuniversity.ie/ | The Letters of 1916-1923 project is the first public humanities project in Ireland. It is creating a crowd-sourced digital collection of letters written around the time of the Easter Rising (1 November 1915 – 31 October 1916). |
| DIY History | https://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/ | DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. Our digital library holds hundreds of thousands of items — much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so we’re appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. |
| FixIt | http://fixit.americanarchive.org/ | You can make historic public radio and television programs from across America easier to search and access. Help professional archivists and history lovers identify and correct errors in machine-generated transcripts. |
| Beyond Words | http://beyondwords.labs.loc.gov/#/ | Help us discover pictures in Library of Congress historical newspaper collections. |
| Roll Credits | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sroosa/roll-the-credits | Help transcribe information from historical television and radio. |
| League of Nations in the Digital Age | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nshreyasvi/league-of-nations-in-the-digital-age | Help us share the archives of the League of Nations, a vital part of world history. |
| Parochial Archives Project in Rome | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/vincent-/parochial-archive-project-in-rome | Transcribe documents from the Parochial Archives Project in Rome. |
| Anti-Slavery Manuscripts | https://www.antislaverymanuscripts.org/?utm_source=asmlaunch | We need your help to turn our collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications. |
| Papers of Julian Bond | https://fromthepage.com/centerfordigitalediting/the-papers-of-julian-bond | Civil rights icon Julian Bond co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, served as chairman of the NAACP, and engaged in political activism on various fronts. Now the University is embarking on a project to make his remarkable collection of documents accessible to the world through a crowdsourced transcription effort. #TranscribeBond is the first stage in the ultimate production of an online, digital edition. |
| Maryland State Archives | https://fromthepage.com/msa | Marriage certificates are among the most requested records here at the Maryland State Archives. These records are needed to apply for a driver’s license, passport, Social Security and health benefits, a mortgage, and for other important life events. Women especially need these documents to prove name changes over the course of a life that might include divorce, death of a spouse, or remarriage. Marriage certificates are also very valuable to genealogical research. |
| Criminal Characters | https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ajpiper/criminal-characters | Crime has been central in shaping the history and society of Australia. This project will make a significant contribution to family, local, social and criminal justice history by revealing untold stories about the lives of people who committed crimes in Australia across time. It aims to discover new perspectives on the types of factors that led to individuals ending up in the prison system. In particular, it is hoped that the research will challenge existing ideas about what the label of ‘criminal’ has historically meant by revealing the diverse nature of the people who spent time in prison. |
| Ticha Project | https://ticha.haverford.edu/en/ | Ticha allows users to access and explore many interlinked layers of texts from a corpus of Colonial Valley Zapotec manuscripts and printed books, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations, and linguistic analysis, including morphological interlinearization. Ticha seeks to make this corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to scholars in diverse fields, Zapotec community members, and the general public. |
| Irish Dialect Archive Manuscript Collection | https://fromthepage.com/jbhoward/irish-dialect-archive-manuscript-collection | The Irish Dialect Archive (Cartlann na gCanúintí) was established in 1953 by Professor Tomás de Bhaldraithe, as part of the Department of Modern Irish at UCD. The Archive is a resource centre for Irish language lexical / dialect research and consists of card indices, manuscripts, computer-based data and two small libraries. |
| From the Page | https://fromthepage.com | There are a number of transcription projects available on this site. |
Do a Ten Minute Power Point or Video Presentation on the Experience (April 4)
Your presentation should cover the following:
- The goals of the crowdsourcing project
- The type of crowdsourcing opportunities
- The kind of historical materials you are working with
- How well they provide instruction and advice
- What the actual crowdsourcing work was like
- How the site treats you and encourages you to participate further.
Include screen shots or screen capture video in your presentation.