Category: Digital Knowledge

Finding a cultural heritage organization running a crowdsourcing campaign for citizen science contributions was a time-consuming process. It was hard finding an organization that was both interesting and fit the parameters of the type of institution and project I was looking for. Eventually, I found Sing Sing Prison Museum’s project “Shadows on Stone: Identifying Sing…

In this reflection, I will be reflecting on my crowdsourcing experience when contributing to the Florida Memory Program operated by the State Library and Archives of Florida (link: Florida Memory). Posted up above is a screenshot of my contribution: transcribing a list of Confederate Widows Pensions made in 1933 and compiling the data into a…

Enter the #volunpeers For my first ever participation in GLAM crowdsourcing, I decided to try Smithsonian (SI) Transcription Center (TC). This decision was driven by the sheer popularity of TC – centered in a myriad of research articles in addition to a catchy social media hashtag “volunpeers.” TC also has an incredible number of transcribed…

The basics The concept of citizen science and crowdsourcing data isn’t new, especially in the world of botany, gardens, and herbaria. I started volunteering with the herbaria at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill back in 2013 and their programs were already quite well established. SERNEC, or SouthEast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, facilitates…

Revolutionary War Pension Transcription Mission by Alison Simpson For this assignment, I chose to participate in the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Citizen Archivist Revolutionary War Pension Files Transcription Mission. (Citizen Archivist Missions, 2017) The National Archives holds over 12 billion pages of paper records, of which 2.5 million images are digitized. The Citizen…

by Amanda Stinchcomb I began this assignment by conducting research about which institutions were utilizing crowdsourcing initiatives. There were a few journal articles about how cultural heritage institutions were incorporating crowdsourcing into their research, but there were only a few institutions listed at the top of my query results, so I decided to see what…

Launched in 2013, the Smithsonian Digital Volunteer, or “Volunpeer,” Program brings historical documents and biodiversity data to life through transcriptions (“Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center,” 2023). I was drawn to this project because when I worked at the State Archives of Florida, I helped manage our digital volunteer program, which had a similar purpose. Volunpeer…

Sarah Vecere I participated in the Voices Through Time: Stories of Care crowdsourced project by transcribing handwritten records from the UK’s Foundling hospital archive. The project is run by the children’s charity Coram and funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Coram uses the Zooniverse web portal to solicit crowd participation. The project is introduced…