Working at the Zooniverse means that I get to indulge many of my interests beyond astronomy, like history. In January we launched a project in partnership with the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives called Operation War Diary. It’s a ‘citizen history’ site that asks the public to tag and transcribe more than one million war diaries, and other handwritten notes, produced on the western front during the First World War. 2014 is the centenary year of the start of the war and we hope that this project will recover information that had been all but lost over the last one hundred years.
The results of this project are starting to appear now. The project is meant to run for several years, but there are already new ways to explore and understand the data thanks to effort of the tens of thousands of people who have taken part in Operation War Diary. As an example, the video below is an animation of the casualties reported in the diaries tagged so far. You can also see this map online at http://cdb.io/1pqB4kp.
This map was created by Operation War Diary developer Jim O’Donnell and it’s not a final map by any means but it shows the power of crowdsourcing these kinds of tasks. If that all intrigues you, you can involved here http://www.operationwardiary.org/ – and read more about the project in this blog post. You can follow Operation War Diary on Facebook and Twitter too!
I shared this today, in a presentation, as an example of the many projects created by the Zooniverse team, which could be described as ‘Social Machines’. I work as part of a project called SOCIAM, which is investigating these Social Machines as a research topic.
Social machines were predicted in the early days of the web and are an emergent, social entity typified by large group of people working together online to achieve things neither the machine nor the human network could otherwise achieve. Zooniverse projects are a great example of a social machine for scientific discovery, which is why we were invited to join this collaboration.
Social machines often involve very large-scale human participation; they may generate large volumes of data; and they may try to solve social or technical problems from the reverse perspective. Wikipedia is a social machine too, for example, as is Reddit, eBay, and Ushahidi.
Operation War Diary and the other Zooniverse projects combine people in a way that can only be achieved through the web, and many of the participants then contribute in new and unexpected ways*, enriching the overall output of the platform. This makes it a notable social machine, and a great citizen science platform.
Sorry – this has been a rather rambling post. So to conclude here’s a link to many more Operation War Diary maps, prodded by Jim, on CartoDB: https://the-zooniverse.cartodb.com.
[* See Spanish Flu in Old Weather, Yellow Balls in MWP, Green Peas in Galaxy Zoo]
Orbiting Frog 
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