#wednesday wander

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Cultural Institutions Embrace Crowdsourcing. A blog post at "The Signal: Digital Preservation" on 2015-09-16.

How’s this for a #WednesdayWander? We’re sharing this blog post from the Signal blog team at Library of Congress that masterfully rounds up a range of crowdsourcing, citizen science, and participatory projects. It mentions our TC activity, as well as many of our friends and their projects. Here are just a few of those included:

Citizen Archivist Dashboard at usnatarchives ( @todaysdocument )

Atlas of Living Australia DigiVol

DIY History (uispeccoll please let them know!)

libraryofva The Library of Virginia newspapers -  

nypl & nyplmaps - What’s on the Menu, Menumapping, and Building Inspector

Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Purposeful Gaming 

There are so very many ways you can join to preserve cultural heritage, help scientists, leverage local and national documents for social change, and learn about our shared histories and environments. Oh, and you may just have fun! 

We’ll add Zooniverse projects including the newly launched AnnoTate with Tate and the ArtStor Arcade to the list.

We call it a #WednesdayWander because we want you to head over and try other crowdsourcing and citizen science projects. With your feedback and insights, all of our activities improve - and perhaps we can build some new standards for unlocking knowledge together.    

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Introducing #WednesdayWander, where we’re sharing sites, games, and resources for citizen science, history, cultural heritage, art, and education (and probably more!). 

This week we’re excited to share two brand new projects with you:

Help our friends at the Biodiversity Heritage Library with their partners Missouri Botanical Garden and the TiltFactor labs as they present two new games from the Purposeful Gaming Project. You’ll bash bots as you verify snippets of text to match OCR outputs from scientific texts.  

Try Smorball (image above) which features excellent in-game tutorials and take on Walruses, Portents, and more along your path to victory. 

You can also play Beanstalk and watch the world whizz by as you scale new heights with the pace of your typing. 

Our second site to wander toward is the new LibCrowds project from the British Library and British Library Labs team. Help match and index catalog cards from the Pinyin Card Catalogue. You’ll be bringing indexable metadata to life (and better use!), all while setting the stage for even more projects to emerge from the British Library’s Explore system. Go anonymous or create an account for more in-depth interaction.

Interested in the technology behind these tools? Grab or add to the code for the Purposeful Gaming project Beanstalk here. LibCrowds is built with PyBossa (and we’ll tell you more about other sites built with this great base in future weeks).

Tell us your candidates for next week - what other activities should #volunpeers try?