The idea of crowd sourced projects is something I’ve always enjoyed either developing or being involved in, from my many years at coderdojo to large scale volunteer initiatives. I’m much more used to in- person, hands on work but obviously because of the pandemic such a thing cannot happen for a time. Zooniverse seems to be a perfect site for academics during these times to keep one’s mind busy and engaged.
I looked over 2 projects on Zooniverse as one of the projects I had been working on ended up being postpone as all the images for transcribing has been completed and more needed to be digitised for work. I chose an archaeological and botanical project as those are areas I’ve always had fondness for. I realise we were supposed to find something related to our minor however as I regret choosing the minor I did choose now after having to deal with the department it belongs to I decided to choose projects that were related to the work I wanted to be involved in at a future stage in my career. I began transcribing for the project Duna, this was a project put up by the National history museum in London. When the original expeditions for the search for different plant-life around the world everything was handwritten in simple accounts that sometimes would be expanded on at a later stage along with sketches done by the botanist at the time. This meant that often the notes and research would be in quite a messy type and could not be transcribed by AI or machine at all. Having this be transcribed by the public was absolutely genius, it is essentially free labour bar the revision of the transcriptions by the archivists but it makes perfect sense for institutes that survive off grants and donations especially at these times when they have no extra income from visitors to their exhibitions. In regards as to how the transcribing was categorised was that it in two main parts, the first being similar to one making a comment box on a regular documents by adding a text box and describing what was adjacent to said text box with very basic meta tags. The second part was putting all of this information into a single text box with the same tags but in the exact layout of the page as it was seen. which now that I’ve looked into more work on transcribing makes a lot of sense as to why you have those two seperate parts to the classifications whereas at the beginning I found it monotonous and repetitive. For me the transcription was quite easy, my mother is a botanist and she passed much of that information onto me throughout my life, because of this I have access to a ridiculous amount of plant identification books which meant when I found a plant name written in an non-leggibile script I could do some investigation by figuring out the first letter and look through my illustrated encyclopedias and figure out what it was I was writing about to make for a better classification. The tool had some very useful tags that you could add at the click of a button: [unclear]word[/unclear], there were two more but because the project is suspended I cannot remember or find them. These tags, I’m guessing, make the revision of the documents considerably easier for the archivists before the publishing of these classifications in their online digitised library.
For me, having contributed to this brings me so much joy. Science is my one true love and by hell or highwater I will find a way to make this degree suit a future in science or science communications. I have once before contributed to an exhibition at the Natural History museum with the help of my uncle and a colleague of his who worked there and needed owl pellets (which are just the coolest thing ever I mo thuairim) for research, this led to my fascination with raptor and bird of prey pellets and subsequent projects and research done on them. In my mind to contribute to science is one of the greatest things ever, in comparison to my contribution to open street map last year my additions to this project meant quite a bit more to me and I had much less apprehension about actually working on it. Which really does shift my view on crowd sourced projects as I had previously thought it was not something I wanted to be involved in over how anxious I was about adding to Open Street Map last year, when after this I realised I had been involved in such projects for years but they never seemed as such to me because I loved what I was doing and would become completely engrossed in the work. So the consequence of my contribution is something that I took more seriously in my methods rather than my end result. I worried about what I was doing every step similar to how I would be when nursing an injured animal but because it’s something I love to do or am so adept at doing my brain goes into an autopilot that allows me to work at my best whilst being incredibly careful in my work. When I go into this state I already know how the work I am doing is going to turn out and the fear dissipates for me. It’s not something that happens but I know it does happen almost always when science is involved, be it research or the nature science it takes to care a raven back to health.
The second project I looked at was World Architecture Unlocked, this was so I could have a more broad view of the projects being done on this platform and how the went about their work. The was this one was transcribed was slightly different, which made sense as it was descriptions of images or landmarks. The transcribing categories were already separated into what the project needed so no extra information would be put into the classification and made it more accessible for those who maybe were not familiar with tagging transcriptions. The process for this was much faster than that of Duna, at most a transcription for this project was a sentence long compared to the many paragraphs of botanical notes and sketches per page. This work was for the The Courtauld‘s Conway Library, which similar to the Natural History work would be published online once the digitisation was finished. I only spent maybe 4 hours on this project compared to the other because as much as I enjoy archaeology (I’m not kidding here, I do enjoy it greatly, I was even on a archaeological quiz show when I was younger), it is not as close to my heart at botanicals and I merely did this extra work to get a better scope of the work being done.
Now as to how I can use the skills I’ve learned from this in the future or in my thesis. Well, firstly I have discovered how much I enjoy transcribing and I envy those who are paid to do it on the daily. My dream would be to work in archives or a museum so were I able to use these skills in the future to obtain a job in those fields, I’d be overjoyed. For my thesis, I honestly don’t know how I would tie the use of transcribing in. I don’t know where this degree will take me or how I can make a thesis that ties up what I’ve learned into a nice package but I would certainly like to use these skills in my future. They are obviously incredibly things to be able to do and I will happily contribute to other projects, either dh or other, for the time being to be able to be active in the community. However, in regards to doing something crowdsourced in the future would be a very cool thing to do. I quite enjoy teaching and would love to do something with pellets and a teaching tool to go along with it, maybe a crowdsourced project will help me achieve that at some date but for the time being, I can’t see many options for myself to use crowdsourcing for where I’m at right now.
