Santa's DH Helpers

Writing about web page https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/steve-dot-ranford/santas-dh-helpers

Ever wished you had access to a troop of elves to help you achieve what would appear to be an impossibly large task? There are in fact a number of freely available online digital tools that academics can make use of, and it's easier than you may think to set up, as our christmas blog post this year looks to demonstrate.

Text transcription, classification and tagging are three relevant types of citizen science of use in the humanities. These can each enrich sources with structured metadata to help them be more useful in research methods of analysis over large sets of data.

Enabling members of the public and enthusiasts to get involved in a research project can also cause contributors to develop an affinity to the project and follow its progress - seeing their efforts combine with others' and being used to discover insights and often produce new representations and visualisations of the data. There are a number of existing projects in the humanities.

We've produced a demonstration project to show you just how easy it is to set-up a crowdsourcing project, anda one for you to get hands-on and play with. The work you'll be doing, is to help Santa transcribe letters he's received. These handwritten pages need transforming into transcribed text that can be used in the workshop to identify what children have requested.

Please pitch-in: Santa's DH Hepers on Zooniverse

Check out some other research projects with crowdsourcing:

• https://www.oldweather.org
• http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham
• http://all-sorts.org

Further resources:

• RunCoCo - how to Run a Community Collection Online (Oxford University Computing Services)
• Crowdsourcing - the wiki way of working (JISC Info Kits)
• Building the Digital Cultural Commons - (Open Knowledge Foudation - The Public Domain Review)

If you would like to explore how Zooniverse could be used in your current or future project, please drop us a line.

Happy Christmas from the Digital Humanities Team!

Steve Ranford : 21 Dec 2016 10:45 |  Tags: Crowdsourcing Zooniverse |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem