Analytical Reflection of The World War II Rumor Project
“The Library of Congress” launched a ‘Crowdsourced Project’ named ‘By the People’ in 2018. It allows volunteers to transcribe, review, and add tags for digitized pages from the Library’s collections. The crowdsourcing project will enable individuals to contribute to making data more usable, discoverable, and valuable while gaining new skills and knowledge, including reading older, cursive handwriting.
It has several projects and I choose ‘Information and Disinformation: The World War II Rumor Project’ to edit and add tags so that people find the information quickly. I registered as a volunteer and it was a very simple procedure. It requires a valid email address to set the username and password. After registering I started to look for a project that interest me. They have simple guidelines on how to transcribe, review or add tags for a particular set of documents.
Crowdsourcing is an important way to manage big data projects. For my ‘Cultural Heritage Data and Social Engagement course, I was looking for an opportunity to work on a project. I think this project relates to the course as I have learned how crowdsourcing saved Ukrainian Cultural Heritage through SUCHO (2022) project.
I have also found Livingstone Online (2019) where crowdsourcing became a dedicated platform to review the written, visual, and several legacies of the famous explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873).
My editing and adding tags for The World War II Rumor Project
Nicole M. Brown et al (2016) took an effort to recover Black Women’s lived experiences. They conducted a study that searched approximately 800,000 books, newspapers, and articles in the HathiTrust and JSTOR Digital Libraries. Library of Congress took an initiative to preserve Library’s collection that represents diversity. Engagement with these projects has a reflection of the course theme regarding ‘recovery’ and ‘digital humanities. It is crucial to preserve cultural heritage to save humanity. We learn from our history and culture which paves the way for the future.
Are those images the pages you worked on? Nice.
I like the way you connected the crowdsourcing to Brown’s computational work. The transcriptions and tagging you did in your crowdsourcing efforts are key to being able to do computational humanities work on historical sources.
Yes, Dr. S
I enjoyed working on this crowdsourcing project.