Beyond Collections Conference 2011

A free one-day conference held at OUCS, University of Oxford on 26th May 2011

Our ‘Beyond’ conference this year will celebrate the  joys and challenges of community collections. It will  be hosted by the RunCoco project and sponsored by JISC . The conference will be of interest to learning technologists, librarians, museums, community groups, archivists and researchers.

Through ‘crowdsourced’  community collections the general public or members of a particular group are invited to contribute to a project by uploading their own content or adding information to existing resources. This event will be  an opportunity to reflect upon the range of models of crowdsourcing and community engagement projects in higher education. 

We welcome colleagues who are involved in digital and community collection projects and our friends and contributors to LTG’s annual ‘Shock and Beyond’ events.

To sign up for the event please register at:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BeyondCollections

Tag your blog posts, tweets, and photos of the Beyond Borders Conference #beyond2011

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Send in the crowds

Through a community collection the general public or members of a particular group are invited to contribute to a project by uploading their own content or adding information to existing resources.

For sustainable crowdsourcing :
Aim for two-way engagement
Be part of your community
Challenge your assumptions

RunCoCo set out to offer advice, training, and open-source software to those interested in running a community  OER collection online using similar approaches as The Great War Archive and WoruldhordThe team  aimed to build a support network to exchange knowledge about community collections, provide a point of contact for advice about community collections, and publish outputs which can be used for free by anyone in the sector. At RunCoCo events, projects have come together to exchange success-stories and to discuss the challenges of various community engagement models. 

Alun  and Ylva presented on community collections and the power of the crowd at the JISC conference 2010[i], at blended learning[ii] conferences in the UK and at meetings or workshops across Europe. Kate contributed to the debate ‘Should the general public be involved in academic research?’ in JISC Inform[iii].  The types of projects represented at the RunCoCo events and the topics covered included: community collection; using Flickr for crowdsourcing; manuscript transcription; ‘citizen science’; community archives; community archaeology; mass observation; engaging communities like school children, the elderly or the homeless; digital storytelling; digitisation; policies, strategies and impact; good practice for Web design; content management systems; trust and authenticity; copyright and IPR; communications, marketing and publicity; project and / or community sustainability; digital preservation; social media and social networking e.g. Facebook, Flickr and Twitter; and ‘Big Society’.  I’ll host a  final event in May 2011, “Beyond Collections: Crowdsourcing for public engagement” at OUCS [iv].

The workflows and systems developed for The Great War Archive have been re-used in different contexts, and RunCoCo has made these freely available for future projects to use, re-use and build upon. Community Collection software ‘CoCoCo’ developed by Oxford University is available and the system has been adapted for use by others[v]. Based on feedback from users, the system has been developed[vi] and the latest version with support documentation are freely available to download from the RunCoCo website  and will be released on GitHub[vii].The RunCoCo website will remain online to continue this dissemination.


[i] JISC conference 2010, community collections and the power of the crowd http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10/programme/communitycollections.aspx

[ii] Fifth International Blended Learning Conference “Developing Blended Learning Communities” 16 – 17 June 2010 http://www.herts.ac.uk/about-us/learning-and-teaching/learning-teaching-institute/conferences/blended-learning-conference-2010/home.cfm

[iii] LINDSAY, Kate and KEEN, Andrew: Debate Should the general public be involved in academic research? JISC Inform issue 27 Spring 2010. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/jiscinform/2010/inform27.aspx

[iv] “Beyond Collections: Crowdsourcing for public engagement. A RunCoCo Conference” at the University of Oxford http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/beyond2011/

[v] Welsh Voices of the Great War Online website http://www.welshvoices.com/

[vi] Use-cases were worked-up by the team, and the open source Redmine project management Web application (http://www.redmine.org/) was used to create and comment on feature requests and bug reports. [vii] GitHub website https://github.com/

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Europeana crowdsourcing memories in Germany

Erster Weltkreig promotional film, on YouTube

The German National Library (die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek – DNB) launches a new crowdsourcing project today, “Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten” (The First World War in everyday documents).EWA_LOGO Online, anyone can submit family memories and photos of letters, postcards and studio portraits that relate to that War. There are also a series of roadshows in 4 German cities where the public will be invited to come along with their material for the team to digitise on the spot. Although the emphasis is currently on the German experience, Europeana (who are funding this) are planning to roll this collection out to a number of other countries in the lead up to the centenary of 1914-1918.

RunCoCo on Tour

RunCoCo (based at the University of Oxford) has been supporting the work of the DNB, offering training and guidelines and the CoCoCo open-source software that is being used to collect contributions from the community.We will be travelling over the next 3 weeks around Germany, and updating our progress on this blog and on Twitter, follow #Europeana and @RunCoCo!

Film

The press campaign is built around a film based on a fascinating story from The Great War Archive (which the RunCoCo team ran in 2008). The friendship of RAF man Bernard Darley and German prisoner of war Otto Arndt was one which the team blogged about. A short film about this unlikely friendship illustrates the Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten project’s intention vividly. Luise Arndt, Otto’s great-grandchild, finds out more about her grandfather on the Europeana website and even gets in touch with Bernard’s family. The film is available to view on the website, and can also be seen in YouTube, (pictured above).

The press release can be downloaded from the Europeana press pages as a PDF, and the text includes:

Press Release

Project Launch: “Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten” – The First World War in everyday documents

Pictures, letters and memorabilia wanted – Berlin, 24 March 2011: “The First World War in everyday documents” is
launched today with a call to the public in Germany to participate in building a
digital European archive by contributing private memorabilia from the First
World War. We are looking for photographs, letters, diaries, short films, audio
recordings, objects and their stories. Following the launch of the project, four
roadshows take place in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart. The
project is a partnership between Europeana, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
and Oxford University.

Call for participation – We ask everybody to bring World War 1 memorabilia to the roadshows. They
will be digitised professionally and added to the online archive, along with
corresponding descriptions. Independently of the roadshows, everyone can
contribute their digitised images and information to the website –
www.europeana1914-1918.eu

Until 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War
One, we will collect memorabilia in digital form from many of the countries
involved in the War. The project aims to save people’s family memories of this
tragedy that convulsed Europe and make them accessible to the world.
The historian Prof Dr Gerhard Hirschfeld of Universität Stuttgart/Bibliothek für
Zeitgeschichte, highlights the significance of the project: “It is vital that we hold
onto private letters and documents to reconstruct the everyday life of wartime
and the mindsets of those involved. We need to give a voice to those people
who otherwise remain silent. Their experiences as well as their fears, hopes
and fantasies are normally inaccessible to historians.”

Memorabilia and stories are kept by families for a while, but after a century
their significance is starting to fade. This First World War digital archive makes
it possible to renew and share their significance.

“By inviting people to actively contribute to its content, Europeana opens up to
users on a new level. To bring together family lore and the memories of those
involved in World War One from different countries, who have experienced
this time as allies or opponents, is a fascinating undertaking. World War One
resonates in the collective memory, and this project will spark renewed
popular interest and also scholarly research,” said Dr Elisabeth Niggemann,
Chair of the Europeana Foundation and Director General of the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek, outlining Europeana’s aims for the project.

A new approach: crowdsourcing – One innovative aspect of the project is the application of crowdsourcing –
collecting input from people at large and assembling a wide variety of family
memorabilia which will be made accessible to the public and to researchers. In
2008, Oxford University produced a remarkable collection of 1914-18 papers,
pictures, souvenirs and memorable stories, digitised by people across the UK
and the Commonwealth in The Great War Archive
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/

Public digitisation roadshows:

  • Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main 31 March 2011, 10-20 hours
  • Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – PK 2 April 2011, 10-17 hours
  • Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München 6 April 2011, 10-20 hours
  • Württembergische Landesbibliothek / Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart 12 April 2011, 10-20 hours

Press contact: Facts & Files, Frank Drauschke

Notes: Europeana (www.europeana.eu) is a partnership of European cultural
heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised
content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual
collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 15 million books,
films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500
content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state
and the interface is in 27 European languages. Europeana receives its main
funding from the European Commission.

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Day of Digital Humanities

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011

Ever wondered what a digital humanist is or does?  On Friday March 18th 2011 you have the chance to find out. Or are you a digital humanist yourself? Then you may want to take part in the Day of Digital Humanities by telling others about what you do.

The Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities is a community publication project looking at a day in the work life of people involved in humanities computing. On Friday March 18, digital humanists from around the world will document and share the events of their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal.

You can find more information about the day on the
Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2011 page. You can also follow what is happening by watching the front page http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2011/ or subscribing to it’s newsfeed.

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London Citizen Cyberscience workshop

The London Citizen Cyberscience Workshop took place at the end of January. Some 20 participants gathered to listen to a series of presentations about cyberscience projects, and to discuss the kind of questions that lend themselves to a cyberscience approach.

Citizen Cyberscience – the big picture

After welcome and introductions, Francois Grey (Citizen Cyberscience Centre and Tsinghua University, Beijing) presented  ‘the big picture’  – an overview of the area with examples of different kinds of projects. He suggested that there are seven ‘myths’ that cyberscientists often have to fight against, seven views on cyberscience that many scientists raise against the notion of using cyberscience for their project. These are (slightly rephrased):

  1. Cyberscience doesn’t produce real science
  2. It won’t work for my science
  3. Nobody will be interested in my science
  4. You cannot trust results from ordinary people
  5. It is hugely wasteful (wasting energy)
  6. It doesn’t really engage people
  7. One day we’ll run out of volunteers.

Grey suggested that these have to be addressed in order to be able to engage scientists in cyberscience work (see also Citizen CyberScience Blog). Other talks by Francois Grey:  ‘Citizen Cyberscience‘ (TEDx Warwick 2009),  ‘From distributed computing to distributed thinking‘ (LIFT08).

Citizen Cyberscience in the Humanities

Mark Hedges, Deputy Director of the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London, talked about Citizen Cyberscience in the Humanities. He gave examples of a number of exciting project such as Transcribe Bentham, Great Ormond Street Hospital records (part of Historic Hospital Admission Records Project), East London Theatre Archive, and Suda Online. He described how many projects require some kind of specialist knowledge on the part of the contributor, for example ability to read and understand Ancient Greek or a familiarity with old terms for difference diseases, but suggested that it is possible to find that kind of expertise also outside traditional academic circles. Hedges also talked about how different motivations drive different people to get involved in citizen cyberscience, and that understanding what it is that attracts people to a project can be useful when designing the tasks to be performed.

Citizen Cyberscince in Anthropology

The anthropologist Jerome Lewis introduced us to work that has been conducted with Pygmy groups across the Congo Basin. By using specially developed software on mobile devises, the locals can record information about their environment which can then be used to ensure that important places such as hunting grounds, burial places or sacred trees are not disturbed by logging companies or prospectors. The devices are also used to collect information about illegal logging and poaching, which can be shared to help monitor and manage the agents involved. The project has encountered, and solved, a number of issues that may seem specific to the particular setting, but that could easily be found in many projects, such as how do you create an interface if you cannot use text, how do you ensure that you reach all relevant participant groups and how do you make sure that the participants know why they are taking part in the project and what it will mean for them?

Data gathering and mobile devices – three examples

Three talks followed, relating to data gathering and mobile devices.

David Aanensen presented EpiCollect – a (free!) web application that anyone can use to quickly create a data collection form and project website for a mobile data collecting project. It will not only let you create the form and run the collection, but you can also see the result of your collection on your project website. Getting started is easy – you create a project website (at EpiCollect.net), design a form using the intuitive online ‘drag-and’drop’  interface, load the form into the mobile app and start collecting data. You can choose what you collect; not only text but also GPS position and photos. You can view what has been collected at your project website or on your phone, and you can also download what you have collected. EpiCollect is an open source project developed at Imperial College, London. It is completely free to use. Currently supported mobile operating systems are Android and iPhone.

Mappiness is an iPhone app developed by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Users of the app are ‘beeped’ at random times of the day and are asked to note how happy they feel at that moment. They are also asked about where they are and with whom. The data is submitted (anonymously) to the project where it is used for research on what environmental factors affect our sense of wellbeing.

We want to better understand how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces. (from the Mappiness website)

Participants can see their own data displayed as graphs or diagrams,  showing for example when or where they are happiest. It is, of course, not possible to say whether it is this feature or the chance to contribute to research that has made so many people participate. The fact is that over 32,000 people have downloaded the application. George MacKerron said that this is well over expectation. He also noted that with success can come drawbacks. Continuing to develop the product, responding to user suggestions and queries takes time, and although media attention is welcome and will increase the amount of data he collects, it is also something that can take time away from doing what you originally set out to do – research.

The final presentation of the day was by Andy Hudson-Smith who talked about TOTeM – Tales of Things. The project has developed a way to link media (text, sound, images) to a physical object. The idea is that you tag things by attaching a small tag with an QR code which you can get from the TOTeM website (a bit like the barcode used in shops). You then link this code/thing to a story, a picture, or sound file. When someone spots the tag and scans it with their mobile phone, they will see the text or picture or hear the sound file. They can add their comments and by and by the ‘tale’ of the thing grows.

Group discussions

In the afternoon, the workshop changed into a more interactive mood and participants moved into small groups. The groups discussed a number of questions, such as ‘What will we be able to do in the coming years with citizen cyberscience?’, ‘How can we move to wider applications and involve more people?’ and ‘What kind of research will we be able to carry out with citizen cyberscience?’. Other questions included ‘What are the technological developments that are required?’, ‘What are the social aspects that we need to understand?’ and ‘What are the sources of funding?’ Although no definite answers were arrived at, many good ideas were raised and it was generally concluded that it was a useful and rewarding exercise.

The whole day was very much appreciated by the participants and it was agreed that this kind of (fairly) local event was very useful to raise awareness of the work that is going on and to prepare for future challenges and opportunities. There was considerable interest in seeing further events of this kind, hopefully before too long.

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How musical are you? New BBC experiment

The BBC is offering you a chance to explore your musicality while at the same time helping scientists with their research. ‘How musical are you?’, the latest addition to the BBC UK Lab crowd sourcing website, is looking at people’s relationship with music. Participants are invited to answer a set of questions and do some practical tests (such as listen to two melodies and say whether they are the same, and tap the beat to a piece of music). At the end of the test, participant can see their individual musical profile that describes their musicality on five different dimension.

Scientists may already know more than ever before about how music can shape the brain, but there is still much to discover. (How musical are you? website)

The individual musical profiles are, however, not the only outcome of the exercise. The (anonymous) information collected through the test is valuable data for scientists who are working on understanding the musical brain – what it means to be ‘musical’ and how engaging with music affects our brains.

Sample musicality profile

Sample musicality profile

Anyone can take the test, whether you think you are musical or not and irrespective of any musical training or ability. You do not even have to like music! Your musicality is ‘scored’ in five categories:

  • Enthusiasm for music
  • Musical perception
  • Emotional connection
  • Social creativity
  • Musical curiosity

The test, which takes about 25 minutes, can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/musicality/. On the website, you can read more about the musicality categories and even see recommendations of programs selected for you based on your test results.

What the test will show is that musicality is a complex issue, and that it is not only those with musical training or formal schooling in music that are musical. With the help of the information gathered through this online test, scientists can explore the question of musicality further and learn what it is and what it means to us and our development.

The test was developed by staff from the Music, Mind and Brain research group at Goldsmiths, University of London in collaboration with BBC Lab UK. The data will be analysed by the researchers and the results of the experiment will be announced on the BBC UK Lab website within 18 months.

Lab UK opens science up to hundreds of thousands of participants, enabling you to help us create new knowledge and answer big scientific questions. (from BBC UK Lab website)

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London Citizen Cyberscience Workshop

A workshop on citizen cyberscience will be held in London on January 25, 2011, hosted by University College London (UCL).

The aim of this workshop is to promote collaboration on citizen cyberscience between the main London institutions and to share the experiences of those that have worked on/are working on citizen cyberscience projects. (http://londoncitizencyberscienceworkshop.eventbrite.com/)

The workshop has two parts. In the morning session, citizen cyberscience scientists will offer short presentations about their projects. The session after lunch will feature some further talks as well as discussions “around a London-based citizen cyberscience community and also topics on citizen cyberscience more generally”.

For more information and registration (free of charge), visit the event page (http://londoncitizencyberscienceworkshop.eventbrite.com/ where further details about the programme will be made available.

More citizen cyberscience

A previous, very successful citizen cyberscience event was held in London in September 2010. For information about the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit, including links to video recordings of the talks, interviews, presentation slides and much more, see our earlier blog post ‘Post-summit thoughts‘ and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre blog.

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The Great War Archive extends in to Germany

The RunCoCo team are really excited to finally announce…


First World War German Weihnachtspost (Christmas Post) card, image from Flickr photographer Captain Pandapants (All rights reserved), Click on image to see full version from The Great War Archive Flickr Pool.

…that in 2011 the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (the German National Library) and the Europeana Foundation will collect family memories and images from the general public in Germany that relate to the First World War. This is an extension to the University of Oxford’s pilot project, The Great War Archive – part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, which was funded by JISC. RunCoCo will manage the project and provide expertise in engaging the DNB’s partners and audience.

RunCoCo is a JISC-funded project which has used the experience with The Great War Archive to coach other projects in crowdsourcing their research, how to engage online with communities and work with user-generated content. This might be getting the public to do work for you, (giving their time and effort – doesn’t have to be boring – projects making games for people to play), or the public commenting and indexing and in other ways adding their knowledge and enthusiasm for a subject, or the public photographing something like a letter written from the trenches in World War 1 and uploading this to a research collection. See RunCoCo’s website and in this blog (e.g. RunCoCo’s crowdsourcing lessons from The Great War Archive or From The Great War Archive to RunCoCo). Third-party services like Flickr have been a main-stay in sustaining interest and contributions to The Great War Archive – and we will use the contacts we have from The Great War Archive Flickr Group to start the online collection in Germany. Indeed the Christmas greetings card (above, image credit) and the lonely hearts ad (bottom of this post, image credit) were from original items digitised and uploaded to that Flickr group.

Press Release

The Hague 16.12.10 For immediate release
1914-18 archive alliance signed

The German National Library, Oxford University and Europeana have signed an agreement to digitise family papers and memorabilia from the First World War in order to create an online archive about the people involved in the conflict.

Oxford University began the initiative when it asked people across Britain to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea – which became the Great War Archive – has encouraged Europeana, Europe’s digital archive, library and museum, to bring the German National Library into an alliance with Oxford University to roll out the scheme in Germany. The collaboration will bring German soldiers’ stories online alongside their British counterparts in a 1914-18 archive.

There will be a series of roadshows in libraries around Germany that will invite people to bring documents and artefacts from family members involved in the First World War to be digitised by mobile scanning units, and to tell the stories that go with them. There will also be a website allowing people to submit material online if they are unable to attend the local events. Everything submitted will also be available through Europeana, where it will add a new perspective to collections of First World War material from institutions across Europe.

Pictures of Bernard Darley, supplied courtesy of the Great War Archive, University of Oxford, © Merilyn Jones. Click on image to explore the archive.

Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, the German National Librarian, said, “We are proud to be part of this alliance. These artefacts and their stories have survived and we must record them while they are still part of family memory. Little of this material will ever have been on public display, or been made available to historians. What the 1914-18 War demonstrates, especially at the personal level, is the futility of war, and the pity of it for the men and their families.”

Stuart Lee, an Oxford University academic and Director of the Great War Archive said, “Working together with the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and their partners in Germany to extend this initiative will give it new resonance. The Centenary in 2014 of the first year of the war will prompt many people to discover more about it and find out about family members involved. The 1914-18 archive will bring them close to those who witnessed it at first hand, showing the souvenirs that they kept throughout their lives and telling the stories that they handed down the generations.”

Pictures of matchbox given by Otto Arndt to Bernard Darley, supplied courtesy of the Great War Archive, University of Oxford, © Merilyn Jones. Click on image to explore the archive.

“One such story that was submitted to the Great War Archive during the British project exemplifies what we want to do. It concerns RAF man Bernard Darley who was commended for putting out a fierce fire in a workshop containing petrol tanks. At his side throughout was a German prisoner of war, Otto Arndt. The two became friends and Otto made a matchbox from a shell-casing as a memento which he inscribed and presented to his friend. This story shows the human side of the war – in this case an unlikely friendship between normal people caught up in a war not of their making.”

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, says that the organisation is well placed to bring together such partnerships: “Europeana acts as the facilitator in an extensive cross-European network of libraries, museums and archives. We aim to create partnerships with organisations from other theatres of the First World War, such as Belgium, France and the Eastern Front, so their stories can be included.”

“The 1914-18 online archive will reflect the reality of the lives of the soldiery on different sides of the conflict. As a people’s history it will offer a vivid testimony that school students will find compelling, and we are keen to work with educational organisations to create teaching resources. We are also planning exhibitions and information services that provide a pan-European focus on activities around the 1914-18 centenary.”

For more information contact
Images

Pictures of Barnard Darley’s shell-case matchbox are supplied courtesy of the Great War Archive, University of Oxford, © Merilyn Jones

Notes for editors
  • The Great War Archive (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/) contains over 6,500 items contributed by the general public between March and June 2008. Every item originates from, or relates to, someone’s experience of the First World War, either abroad or at home. Contributions were received via a special website and also through a series of open days at libraries and museums throughout the UK. The Great War Archive is run by Oxford University Computing Services and was set up in 2008 with funding from JISC (www.jisc.ac.uk/), the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council (England). JISC is the body that directs strategic investment to support the innovative use of digital technologies in UK colleges and universities.
  • The German National Library – die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (www.d-nb.de/eng/index.htm) is the central archival library and national bibliographic centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. Its task, unique in Germany, is to collect, archive, document and make available all German and German-language publications from 1913 on. In addition it collects foreign publications about Germany, translations of German works, and the works of German-speaking emigrants published abroad between 1933 and 1945. The German National Library maintains co-operative external relations at a national and international level.
  • Europeana (www.europeana.eu) is a partnership of European cultural heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 15 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 27 European languages. Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.
ENDS
Kontaktanzeigen

Lonely hearts advert created from an original photo in the The Great War Archive Flickr Group (Some rights reserved), Click on image to see larger version.

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Milky Way – new Zooniverse site

Do you want to explore the Milky Way? Now you can do that while at the same time helping astronomers with their research. The Milky Way project aims to sort and measure our galaxy, the Milky Way, by examining infrared images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.  You can help by looking at the images online and marking things that you can see. You do not need any subject knowledge or specialist equipment – all you need to do is to go to the Milky Way website.

At the website you will find information about the project and a tutorial which will tell you what you should be looking for and how you mark what you have found. When you are ready to start exploring and marking things, you log into your account and an image will be shown to you. If you have registered for any other Zooniverse project (like Galaxy Zoo or Old Weather) you use the same login. If you do not already have an account, you quickly create one by choosing a name and password.

Understanding the cold, dusty material that we see in these images, helps scientists to learn how stars form and how our galaxy changes and evolves with time. http://www.milkywayproject.org/

The Milky Way is the latest in the Zooniverse series of projects where the the public is invited to take part in scientific work. The first of these citizen science initiatives was Galaxy Zoo, a project where participants classified galaxies (see ‘Learning from Galaxy Zoo’ – presentations by Zooniverse director Chris Lintott at RunCoCo workshops) . The project became a great success and has since been followed by others, for example Moon Zoo and Solar Stormwatch. Old Weather is another recent Zooniverse project with a slightly different angle. Instead of looking at images from space, Old Weather participants examine logs from Royal Navy ships from around the time of World War I and record the date, location, weather and other observations.

The Zooniverse projects bring together over 350,000 citizen scientists from all over the world. In addition to the websites used for collecting data, the projects offer a range of support material and options for interaction and participation. The project blogs discuss issues that have come up and show-case interesting findings. Participants can discuss the project, ask question and offer advice via the forum. It is, however, not only on the website that scientists and citizen scientists work together. A number of academic articles have been published with citizen scientists as co-authors, motivated by the discoveries they made or the input they have had on the research process leading up to the new findings.

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My Leicestershire Digital Archive

Calcutta Pumping Station, Swannington

Calcutta Pumping Station, Swannington

My Leicestershire Digital Archive is a collaborative project bringing together digital resources relating to the history of Leicestershire and make these available online. Project partners include University of Leicester Library, the East Midlands Oral History Archive, the Media Archive for Central England, the Rothley Heritage Trust and the Leicester Industrial History Society. The first phase of the project, funded by the JISC, aims to “create the bases of a digital collection of local history resources for Leicestershire” (from the project website).

Christmas card from 1898

A bit of vanished Leicester.

My Leicestershire Digital Archive will hold digital materials of different kinds and from different times with the common feature that they relate to the history of Leicestershire. In the first phase of the project, a ‘base archive’ will be created by digitising or, if already in digital format, migrating some existing collections that have been identified as meeting a user need. These include oral history interviews, radio programmes, photographs, trade directories, books, and videos. Community contributed material will also be added to the Archive. For this work, the project is working with local history organisations.

The Archive is already making some of its material available online. The growing collection can be searched or browsed on a dedicated website at http://www.myleicestershire.org.uk/.

For more information about the project, please read the:

  • Project blog with project news and discussions of related issues
  • Project plan describing Phase 1 of the project (funded by JISC)
  • Workpackages for Phase 1 of the project (funded by JISC)

The My Leicestershire Digital Archive is funded by JISC within the Developing community content strand of the Digitisation and e-Content programme.

Image credits:

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