Tag Archives: Archive


The Great War Archive: could crowd conscription help?

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

… collaboration is not limited to arguing over government debt), Europeana – Europe’s digital archive, library and museum – aims to make over 400,000 key documents and images from World War I freely available online (with help from libraries and partners across Europe). This will give people everywhere unprecedented access to first-hand information from both sides of the conflict.

Such a project is close to the heart of the people (and moles ) here at Microtask. Many of the documents …

Tags: Archive Christmas Claude Choules crowd crowdsourcing First World War German National Library microtask microwork University of Oxford World War I

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Search me: what Mad Men and brave moles can do for historical records

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

… Ever since we began helping the National Library of Finland correct mistakes in its old newspaper archive, I have noticed myself developing a slightly anti social interest in historical texts. I say ‘anti social’ because of its effect on conversation: what I have found is that while most people claim to be interested in history, the best way to get unwanted guests to leave your house after a dinner party is to start discussing the technical challenges presented by digitizing historical …

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Death 2.0: Crowdsourcing the rest of your (after)life

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… Ostrow ends his talk by discussing the possibility of converting a person’s entire “online archive” into a kind of immortal social media avatar. This “entity” could continue updating for you even after your physical death. It’s a bizarre but compelling concept and, technologically speaking, could soon be possible. Recently, there have been endless projects combining human and artificial intelligence – could the same thing work here? Imagine the crowd checking machine-produced …

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Ancient Lives: crowdsourcing makes history (but will it last?)

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

It sounds like the perfect recipe for crowdsourcing success. Take 200,000 Ancient Egyptian scrolls and upload them to a beautifully designed interactive site.

Add a generous helping of positive publicity and invite online archaeology-lovers to get transcribing.

Welcome to Ancient Lives : a collaboration between crowdsourcing science experts Zooniverse and the …

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From January to June: six months of micro (and macro) work

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… It has been a fantastic six months. The success of Digitalkoot (our newly launched library archive digitization project) has surprised even us: so far, over 60,000 people have completed 4,661,832 microtasks of mole-based fun. In May, we announced Microtask Forms – a crowdsourced service to “digitize and destroy” unwieldy paper forms (check out the free trial ). To top it all, we’re also the proud winners of a Red Herring Europe TOP 100 award – apparently this makes us …

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