Les Oxley: Measuring the ANZACs: Crowd-sourcing WWI with Zooniverse
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 2015-10-20

Day 1 of NDF 2015, 2.00pm Tuesday 13 October 2015

Crowd-sourced approaches to transcription have the potential to allow rapid development of structured data transcribed from historical documents. Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org / Citizen Science Alliance) have recently begun a project to create a complete database of New Zealand World War I and South African War soldiers. The foundation of the project is Archives New Zealand’s complete digitization of millions of pages of personnel files for 140,000 men.

Over the coming years citizen scientists will classify document types within personnel files, and transcribe key information about these Anzac soldiers. Data collected will include names, next of kin, jobs, birthplaces, health at enlistment, key events in the soldiers’ service, and dates of death.

Les Oxley is Professor of Economics at the University of Waikato, and has published extensively on the economic history of New Zealand. He is collaborating on Measuring the Anzacs with Kris Inwood at the University of Guelph and Evan Roberts at the University of Minnesota. @MeasuringANZACs