May Project Briefing

Year of the Bay

The Year of the Bay project is reaching the end of its supported life cycle, but not without a strong finish.  We're still giving some staff support to it, which is enabling continued community outreach and in the final months, some major ingests of content.  Over the last several weeks we've started the upload of thousands of early 20th century rail photos from the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority Archives, which has ramifications both for YoTB and Living With The Railroads projects. Excitingly, you can also download higher resolution copies of these photos now from their website.  We are also lining up thousands of photos that will be coming in from the San Francisco Public Library in the next few months. 

In regards to our many contributions from institutions big and small, I hope to be publish a post soon specifically about licensing (thanks to help from advisory panelist Abigail Phillips, as well as friends at Creative Commons).  

Living With the Railroads

The Stanford railroads team has been busy with continued outreach to railroad enthusiasts, last month hosting a first "research partnership day" which was a knowledge sharing event collaborating between twenty railfans, artists, and scholars to share and enrich content and also dig into some of physical archives held at Stanford.  The event also was the first to include the formal collaboration of a new partner on the project, Project Gado.  Project Gado brings to the table an open source scanning robot to help streamline public pinning days.  Over the summer we'll be experimenting with how this toolset can be utilized in the public workflow, and how it might be a low-cost alternative for institutions and organizations of all sizes looking to get involved in crowdsourcing and Citizen History projects. Thanks to advisory panelist Dave Martens for being our guinea pig on this first round!   

500 Novels

The bulk of our development and design emphasis over the last several months have revolved around the 500 Novels project.  While the Novels team has been working on the crowdsourcing experiments via Mechanical Turk for quite awhile now, and have streamlined that process, we've been working on the first iteration of a new Historypin platform to showcase that data (thanks to advisory panelist George Oates to lots of great thinking around this particularly!).  Before even having data to visualize, this month Wired Magazine had an article about the work that the Stanford team is doing, so hopefully the new data viz will be another boost to the public understanding of "digital humanities" and the new insights  from this kind of work.  The Project features lively art work (in the public domain, thank you very much) that helps bring the research and passages to life, as well as a Victorian era map overlay for the locations. 

Research and Findings

In the background to all the project work is the continued research and analysis of the various projects, which we're now starting to compile with an eye on the end of the project.  We'll be creating a new site which is a much more polished version of our behind-the-scenes blog that will feature many of the outputs of this project, and toolkits for other academic digital humanities centers to consider crowdsourcing and community knowledge projects like these.