History | Zooniverse

This is a guest post from the research team behind The American Soldier in WWII.

As challenges press upon all of us in the midst of the pandemic, the team behind The American Soldier in World War II has some good news to share.

When we initially launched our project on Zooniverse on VE Day 2018, our goal was to have all 65,000 pages of commentaries on war and military service written by soldiers in their own hands transcribed and annotated within a 2-year window – in triplicate, for quality-control purposes. We not only hit that milestone in May 2020, but last week we completed an additional 4th round.

Attracting 3,000-plus new contributors, this extension of the transcription drive took only six months. Beyond allowing more people to engage with these unique and revealing wartime documents, the added round is improving our final project output. Within the next week or so, our top Zooniverse transcribers will begin final, manual verification of these transcriptions and annotations, which have been cleaned algorithmically. If you are a consistent project contributor and interested in helping with final validation, please do let us know by signing up here.

As we move forward with the project, we have created a Farewell Talk board. Since we have had so many incredible contributors to The American Soldier, we would love to hear any parting words our volunteers would like to share with the team and with fellow contributors about your experiences or most memorable transcriptions.

We are so incredibly grateful for the international team of researchers, data and computer scientists, designers, educators, and volunteers who have gotten the project to where it is and in spite of the great upheaval. Thanks to their hard work and dedication, the project’s open-access website remains on track for a spring 2021 launch.

We look forward to sharing more news with you soon. Until then, be well and safe.

The American Soldier in WWII Team

Today sees the launch of another Zooniverse project – and it’s something a little bit different. Old Weather asks you to journey back to the early years of the twentieth century, and comb through Royal Naval logbooks in search of climate data.

It’s surprising, but one of the major problems in testing models that predict the Earth’s climate is in obtaining decent historical data. Dedicated officers on board ship took readings every four hours, but in order for this information to be of use to climate scientists we need to turn it into a form computers can read – and that’s where you come in. The reward for doing this is following along with the voyages of the ships.

Most of our first set of logs comes from the First World War, but the stories include those of a range of historically-important ships including Battle of Jutland-survivor HMS Caroline, which is still in existence in Belfast (see above image), HMS Defence and HMS Invincible, which were both blown up at Jutland with the loss of most of their crews.

We also have the records of less well-known ships including HMS Dwarf, which on service in the Cameroons in 1914 suffered a boat attack similar to the one mounted by Humphrey Bogart’s character in the movie The African Queen, and river gunboats such as HMS Gnat, HMS Mantis and HMS Moth which patrolled the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in a military expedition to Iraq.

Whichever ship you choose to join, we hope you’ll enjoy taking a trip with Old Weather. What’s the weather like when you are?

[The image on this post is of the HMS Caroline as she is today, in Belfast docks. This image is courtesy of Flickr user weelise]

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project completed: The American Soldier in wwII

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