Micropasts: Conducting, designing and funding research into our human past

 [First posted in AWOL 23 October 2013, updated 4 May 2020]

 MicroPasts: Crowd-sourcing

Crowdfuelled and Crowdsourced archaeological data

You can assist existing research projects with tasks that need human intelligence, such as the accurate location of artefact findspots or photographed scenes, the identification of subject matter in historic archives, the masking of photos meant for 3D modelling, or the transcription of letters and catalogues. Other tasks might require on-location contributions by members of the public, such as submitting your own photographs of particular archaeological sites or objects. By contributing to a MicroPasts project you will:

• Have a direct impact on research in archaeology, history and heritage
• Help with tasks that computers cannot do
• Develop skills that interest you
• Produce results that will be open and freely usable

To start contributing, just choose one of our Featured Projects below or visit our full list of ongoing Projects.

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Featured Projects

A special selection of the most interesting projects

British Museum Bronze Age Index Context Cards

Description: Transcription of Context Cards for Bronze Age Bronze finds recorded in the British Museum Bronze Age Index
Last activity: 11 minutes ago
Number of volunteers: 23
Number of tasks: 1595
Overall progress: 13%
Project owner: Andrew Bevan

Video-tagging about the Roman Empire_2

Description: Application for the tagging of short YouTube videos focussing on the Roman Empire and its heritage in modern Britain
Last activity: 19 hours ago
Number of volunteers: 73
Number of tasks: 938
Overall progress: 52%
Project owner: Marta Krzyzanska

Transcription of Hayley's letters

Description: A transcription project for the Fitzwilliam Museum
Last activity: 13 hours ago
Number of volunteers: 42
Number of tasks: 317
Overall progress: 50%
Project owner: Daniel Pett

Transcription of SAL Admiralty seals

Description: A transcription project for the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Last activity: 4 days ago
Number of volunteers: 16
Number of tasks: 419
Overall progress: 20%
Project owner: Daniel Pett

Transcription of Scottish Political Archive leaflets - 2014 Referendum Collection

Description: Help the Scottish Political Archive transcribe their archive of 2014 Referendum leaflets.
Last activity: 2 days ago
Number of volunteers: 5
Number of tasks: 603
Overall progress: 0%
Project owner: Elisa Broccoli

Transcription of the Fitzwilliam Audioguide

Description: Transcription of the Fitzwilliam Audioguide
Last activity: 2 days ago
Number of volunteers: 2
Number of tasks: 16
Overall progress: 0%
Project owner: Daniel Pett

New Forest Setley Plain POW Camp 65 Newspaper 03

Description: Translating a German language newspaper from New Forest Setley Plain POW Camp 65
Last activity: 1 month ago
Number of volunteers: 8
Number of tasks: 35
Overall progress: 42%
Project owner: Andrew Bevan

de commentariis β (on commentaries)

de commentariis β (on commentaries)

Welcome to De Commentariis; an open network for the crowd-sourcing of ancient text commentaries. Construct your own commentaries on classical texts, and view the commentaries others have made. Use it to get your students to critically engage with their learning texts.

This β version web application enables users to 'crowd-source' commentaries on ancient texts. You can construct your own commentaries on ancient texts, and view commentaries others have made. We will soon bring online features for instructors in the Classical Languages to help their advanced classes not only read their assigned texts, but develop ways to critically engage with those texts, both in understanding linguistic constructions and engaging with historical context and textual reception.

• Some sample texts:
• Caesar, Gallic Wars.
• Sallust, Catiline's Conspiracy.
• Cicero, On The Republic.
• Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica.
• Herodotus, The Histories.
• Xenophon, Anabasis.

All Available Works

University of Iowa Libraries DIY History Early Manuscripts

University of Iowa Libraries DIY History

DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. Our digital library holds hundreds of thousands of items -- much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so we're appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. Through "crowdsourcing," or engaging volunteers to contribute effort toward large-scale goals, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts become searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily. Please join us in preserving our past by keeping the historic record accessible -- one page or picture at a time.

Early Manuscripts

160 of 374 pages have been transcribed!

• 

  11% started

  Sermones de Tempore

• 

  17% started

  Bible [leaf]

• 

  25% started

  Bible [leaf]

• 

  68% started

  A will/testament, 1699

• 

  Needs Review

  Psalter [leaf]

• 

  Needs Review

  Bible (Book of Maccabees II, Chapters 2-4) [leaf]

• 

  Needs Review

  Book of Prayers/Psalter [leaf]

• 

  Needs Review

  Bible (Apocrypha) [leaf]

Micropasts: Photo-masking an Egyptian sarcophagus

Micropasts: Photo-masking an Egyptian sarcophagus

 

This application enables the creation of a high quality 3D model of an archaeological artifact via process known as photo-masking. There has been a revolution in 3D modeling in recent years and it is now relatively easy to construct such models from ordinary digital photographs. Isolating the object depicted in these photographs, and masking out the background, is an important first step to achieving high quality results.

This particular photo-masking application is an experiment as we are attempting to model an Egyptian sarcophagus on display at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS). The sarcophagus on permanent loan to DMNS from the Rosemont Museum in Pueblo, CO.

What we want you to do

We would like people to draw a polygon around the object that they see in each photograph in order to identify its outline and exclude the image background. This allows the 3D modeling process to concentrate on the object itself and ignore irrelevant background information.

If you are interested in what our 3D completed models look like, please have a look at our Sketchfab profile.

 Micropasts: Photo-masking an Egyptian sarcophagus

Help crowd source the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) Abydos Tomb cards Cemetery O, P, and Y archives

3 Egyptian Archaeology Projects: Egyptian archaeological crowd-sourcing

This application enables the transcription of archive cards from the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) Abydos Tomb cards Cemetery O, P, and Y archives. Images will be drawn from the EES Flickr feed and redisplayed in the browser window. The EES would like the following information to be transcribed for them to create a searchable archive for their records.
These fields are:

• Excavator's or finder's name
• Date of discovery
• Record number
• Descriptive data
• Whether the card maybe a reverse

The object cards have been scanned by EES volunteers.

This project is on behalf of:

This application is on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Society.

MicroPasts: Crowd-sourcing

Help us gather high quality research data about our human history

You can assist existing research projects with tasks that need human intelligence, such as the accurate location of artefact findspots or photographed scenes, the identification of subject matter in historic archives, the masking of photos meant for 3D modelling, or the transcription of letters and catalogues. Other tasks might require on-location contributions by members of the public, such as submitting your own photographs of particular archaeological sites or objects. By contributing to a MicroPasts project you will:

• Have a direct impact on research in archaeology, history and heritage
• Help with tasks that computers cannot do
• Develop skills that interest you
• Produce results that will be open and freely usable

To start contributing, just choose one of our Featured Projects below or visit our full list of ongoing Projects.

 

SAVE LATIN AND GREEK ON ALPHEIOS!

SAVE LATIN AND GREEK ON ALPHEIOS!

(and help extend its support to other classical languages)

THE PURPOSE
Many of the most important books ever written, the most profound and the most beautiful, were written in one of the ancient languages no longer spoken. ¹ Translations can convey some part of what their authors intended, but by no means all. 
Traditionally it was necessary to devote prolonged study to each language, preferably with a knowledgeable teacher, before ever confronting the original text itself. Today, a variety of online tools can help anyone begin to appreciate the original language whenever they wish. The Alpheios Project was created to bring the latest technology to this task, and already has tens of thousands of users around the world with its reading support tools for Latin, Greek, and classical Arabic and Chinese. The software was designed to permit new languages to be added easily, and there are plans underway for its extension to other classical languages such as Persian, Sanskrit and several others.
In keeping with its mission to bring texts in the classical languages to the widest possible audience, Alpheios has always made its tools available for free and has kept its code open source for use by any other non-profit initiative. 

THE CRISIS
However, at the moment, not only the expansion but even the survival of the present Alpheios functionality is threatened by impending changes to the Firefox browser, which is currently the only platform on which Alpheios runs.  Significant modifications of our code will be needed, and at the moment we do not have the resources to make the changes in the required time frame.

THE APPEAL
We are consequently making our first public funding appeal. We are hoping to raise between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars so that we can employ professional programmers in an accelerated timeframe. Since we are a registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization, all contributions are tax-deductible in the United States.

If you consider this initiative worthwhile, please let others know about it, whether or not you are able to contribute yourself.

At this point we don't anticipate any insuperable technical challenges since the requirements are quite clearly defined and all the original developers of Alpheios remain available for consultation.  We just need competent hands to do the work before the clock runs out on Alpheios.

THE HOPE   
In addition to maintaining Alpheios on Firefox, the changes to the code that must be made will greatly facilitate porting Alpheios to other browsers and to mobile devices, among the most frequent requests from our users. They should also help bring an expanded Alpheios reading environment to other classical languages and provide a more convenient platform for the deployment of a greater variety of language learning games.  We believe that the supreme importance of the classical languages, and their immediate relevance to our present world,  can only be fully appreciated when they can all be studied with similar tools in a common reading environment. 
-------
(1) (Perhaps the best known of these "classical languages" are ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and classical Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, but there are many more, including Old Norse and Old English, Old French and the Langue d'oc, Old Spanish and Old and Middle High German, not to mention the great languages of the ancient middle east, such as Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Classical Armenian, Syriac and Aramaic, or the classical Japanese of the Man'yōshū.

Upload Meketre

Upload Meketre

Upload is part of the interdisciplinary research project From Object to Icon, conducted at the Institute for Egyptology in cooperation with the research group Multimedia Information Systems at the University of Vienna (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, project number P 25958). It is based on the research that was initiated with the project MeKeTRE (Middle Kingdom Tomb Relief Evolution), in the course of which we have started to systematically collect, research, and study the reliefs and paintings of Middle Kingdom tombs of Ancient Egypt. For more details on the projects click here.
The data collected so far are available online in the MEKETREpository that has been developed in order to serve public use. It provides users with a collection of themes and scenes attested in the decorative programme of the tombs of officials datable to the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom (ca. 2150–1640 BC) and encompasses plans, images (drawings and photographs), descriptions as well as references. 

Upload constitutes a crowd sourcing approach that is ideally suited to enrich the MEKETREpository. It is a platform enabling users to upload unrestricted high-quality photographs depicting relevant art items in Middle Kingdom tombs, provide annotations, or suggest inclusion of new thesaurus terms. It offers an easy-to-use interface through which everyone can share private photo collections and perform simple repetitive but highly helpful tasks, thereby contributing to the scholarly enterprise. Upload is meant to engage both scholars as well as the interested public. 

The expected results are twofold: First, we aim to acquire extensive material (especially photographs) that has the potential to complement the MEKETREpository. All data of sufficient quality gathered through Upload will be regularly transferred to the repository and certainly improve its usability. Second, the methods developed and applied in the implementation and data gathering process will constitute a contribution on their own, hopefully providing valuable insights about quality assessment and integration of data coming from citizen science projects. 

Utilizing a crowd sourcing approach to support the work of Egyptologists is a novel yet promising way to assist the workflow of scholars.

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TerraWatchers: Crowd Sourced Satellite Image Analysis

TerraWatchers: Crowd Sourced Satellite Image Analysis

Who We Are

TerraWatchers is dedicated to providing web-based, crowdsourced satellite image monitoring and overwatch tools for critical missions related to current events. We use interactive Google Maps© interfaces to display the latest freely available, high-resolution satellite imagery in our mission footprints.

Get Involved!

The public can participate in our citizen science efforts, and get involved in our missions by registering on the form to the right. Registered users can view and annotate satellite images with markers specific to our various missions. We provide training images for our missions, so you can see what we're looking for, and how to annotate our images.

Only registered users can annotate the satellite images with observations, so please remember to Register first, using the form in the upper right corner. If you are registering, press the "Register Here" button; it will open a small form, where we collect your name, email address, a password, and a password reminder. That's all the personal information we need, and we don't share it with others. Once you've registered, you can log in with your email address and password.

TerraWatchers.org Results Report as of September 2, 2015, 11:47 am (Arizona)

TerraWatchers.org currently has 162 registered users.

Currently, 63 users have contributed to
"The Impact of Military Activity and Looting on Archaeological Sites in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq"

98.380% of the seedpoints in the mission have been visited at least once.
There have been 9,574 visits to 2,551 of 2,593 seedpoints, an average of 3.753 visits per seedpoint.
Users have made 2,264 observations on 1,250 seedpoints (49.000% of visited seedpoints), an average of 1.811 observations per seedpoint.

Observations:

• 34 users observed 521 instances of "Looting" on/near 243 seedpoints (9.526%).
• 19 users observed 84 instances of "Air Defense" on/near 56 seedpoints (2.195%).
• 36 users observed 343 instances of "Revetment/Berm" on/near 189 seedpoints (7.409%).
• 20 users observed 88 instances of "Military Hardware" on/near 63 seedpoints (2.470%).
• 23 users observed 88 instances of "Trench" on/near 67 seedpoints (2.626%).
• 19 users observed 85 instances of "Bunker/Shelter" on/near 58 seedpoints (2.274%).
• 17 users observed 46 instances of "Other Structure" on/near 39 seedpoints (1.529%).
• 24 users observed 89 instances of "Impact Crater" on/near 66 seedpoints (2.587%).
• 9 users observed 50 instances of "Other" on/near 36 seedpoints (1.411%).
• 1 users observed 513 instances of "Confirmed" on/near 190 seedpoints (7.448%).
• 2 users observed 357 instances of "Correction" on/near 110 seedpoints (4.312%).

And see AWOL's Roundup of Resources on Ancient Geography

Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr) Crowdsourcing Project

Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr) Crowdsourcing Project

The Encyclopaedia Iranica (EIr) is launching a crowdsourcing project to improve access to our its free website (http://www.iranicaonline.org/).  Since the URL update in Spring 2010 there are still many broken EIr links on Wikipedia.  For those who would like to assist the Wikipedians and the EIr by repairing these links, here are the instructions:

What is a broken link?

A broken link is a link that no longer works properly, leaving readers stranded as they cannot connect to hyperlinked web pages, servers, or other resources on the internet (see also the definition in the Wikipedia entry “link rot” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot).

Broken link sample: http://www.iranicaonline.org/newsite/articles/ot_grp7/ot_kangavar_20050323.html

What can I do to help?

Create a Wiki ID and fix broken EIr links. Here is how:

Create a Wiki ID

Log on to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Login). If you do not have a Wiki username and password, you must create a Wiki ID, which will track and identify your work in Wikipedia.  This audit trail will allow fellow Wikipedians to post questions and comments about your work on the respective pages.

Use Google to find broken EIr links in Wikipedia

Use Google (http://www.google.com/) to look for EIr links that are broken by copying the terms given below into the search bar:

allinlinks: "iranica.com/newsite" site:wikipedia.org

• Please note that some EIr links with the old iranica.com URL are still working fine as they automatically redirect to the new URL, but in order  to prevent future malfunction they also need to be updated.  
• Please ignore image files (.jpg, .gif, .png) whose Wikipedia URL starts with “File” (e.g., File:View of Erevan in 1796.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

Do You Have Excellent Latin Skills?

Volunteers with excellent Latin sought

... The Papyri.info site includes some 52,000 transcribed texts, of which about 2,000 in Latin, very few translated into English or any other modern language. The collaborative editing tool SoSOL (deployed at papyri.info/editor) allows users to add to or improve existing editions of papyrological texts, for example by adding new translations.

If you think you might like to take part in this exercise, take a look for instance at O. Bu Njem, a corpus of 150 ostraka from the Roman military base at Golas in Libya. The Latin texts (often fragmentary) are already transcribed; do you think you could produce an English translation of a few of these texts, which will be credited to you? Would you like a brief introduction to the SoSOL interface to enable you to add the translations yourself (pending approval by the editorial board)? ...

Read the rest!