In January, I started volunteering as a citizen scientist on a platform called Zooniverse. Zooniverse is a platform where researchers can “recruit” the help from volunteers around the world to help with classifications in their projects. This could be anything from identifying animals in a picture to helping transcribe civil war registries. Since starting, I have done almost 11,000 classifications on 42 different projects (that’s equal to almost 62 hours of volunteering!).
Zooniverse keeps track of your stats and can generate a volunteer certificate if you want to show your efforts if you are involved in a volunteering scheme (i.e. need volunteer hours for graduation). There is even a chance to become a beta tester to be able to test out projects before they become public and provide feedback to those in charge of projects. If you’re unsure about something you’re classifying, you can also ask questions on the talk boards of the project to get clarification.
Here are a few of my favourite projects I’ve worked on:
Documentation Detectives: Transcribing Accession Records
This project focuses on human transcription of the Birmingham Museum’s object accession registers to help them build an accessible collections database. I personally like this project because it is easy to do when you’re a fast typer and easier to decipher handwritten text compared to other transcription projects I’ve participated in. I like to imagine the objects I’m transcribing and have sometimes even done some extra research to learn about about objects I wasn’t familiar with – especially objects from 1400-1600s.
This project is a fairly new one and first started with a data set where you would respond if there was an illustration on the scanned page and more details about what it contained. Now, there is a section to help write a caption for the illustrations. The aim for this project is to help describe children’s book illustrations to develop AI that can better understand the visual history of storytelling. I like participating in this project because the illustrations are from various countries and different eras. Some are funny and make me laugh. I like seeing how children’s illustrations have evolved over the years.
This project involves watching short video clips and identifying the animals shown from camera traps in Africa. The project’s aim is “to helping us better understand cultural evolution, this project will also document wildlife populations and biodiversity in these areas. Already we have both documented new chimpanzee behaviors and made some startling finds of animals in locations where they were no longer thought to live!” I like classifying on this project because of the videos it makes it more interesting to watch instead of looking at still pictures and classifying from there. I also like seeing animals uncommon to where I live and see them going about their day.
I hope this has sparked some interest or inspiration for you to get started volunteering! There is a project for everyone’s interests and all different levels. Do as little or as much as you want to do!
xx Hannah
Idealistic Iowan 