For this week’s assignment to participate in a dh project or platform, I went broad rather than deep. I did three things (or more, depending on how you count them):
First, I created a Zooniverse account and participated in three Zooniverse projects. Zooniverse is a platform for “people-powered research.” In practice, that means it’s a collection of disparate projects in the humanities and sciences that invite non-experts to participate. The web interfaces for the projects vary. For instance, some require brief training sessions before participation, while others do not, and all three that I looked at required different kinds of participation and input modalities.
Old Weather prompts participants to “help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by United States ships since the mid-19th century by transcribing ships’ logs.” Logs must be annotated before they are transcribed. The interface presents the user with a series of simple questions (such as “do you see a date on this page?”). If the user indicates that he sees tabular weather data, he is prompted to outline the shape of the table and transcribe the data. I also contributed to two non-humanities projects, Condor Watch and Plankton Portal.
Condor Watch allows users to participate by marking condors and answering questions about photos from camera traps, while Plankton Portal similarly prompts users to mark and categorize plankton in images from two different regions.
Second, I created the “Digital Humanities at LSU” Facebook group. I added most of the class to the group; if I missed you, please request to join. Hopefully this group will lower the barriers to communication among students in this class, as well as (eventually) other interested scholars at LSU.
Third, I created a personal WordPress site called Fleetmeat. I intend to use it to communicate my ideas in an informal but still “published” form through the blog, as well as to provide information about myself (such as my CV). I haven’t done much with it yet but hopefully its existence will spur me to build it up.
