Archive for the crowdsourcing Category (10 posts)

LC Labs Letter: September 2020

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September 2020

LC LABS LETTER

A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team

Projects

The Newspaper Navigator Search Interface has launched!

Breaking news! You can now visit //news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search  to interactively browse over 1.5 million historic photos from the Chronicling America database of digitized newspapers. Innovator in Residence Ben Lee built this application to give users with all levels of technical experience a simplified and dynamic way to explore the Newspaper Navigator dataset, which he created by using a machine learning algorithm to identify and extract all the visual content in Chronicling America.

Ben’s search application for Newspaper Navigator allows site visitors to search for images by visual similarity. First, visitors enter a keyword and select relevant photos from the search results based on what they’re looking for. This trains a machine learning algorithm, called an “AI Navigator,” which then searches through the collection of images again but this time identifies only those that are visually similar to the ones selected by the user.

As a result, visitors to the site can reverse image search by training their very own machine learning “classifier” on the fly. Don’t take our word for it–visit the Newspaper Navigator experiment page to try it out yourself!

 

THIS WEEK: Citizen DJ Showcase premieres at the virtual National Book Festival

Reminder to tune in starting this Friday, September 25 to check out the Citizen DJ Showcase at the virtual National Book Festival. DJ Kid Koala will headline the Citizen DJ booth and feature his intercity beat tape featuring tracks made from creatives across the country using Library of Congress collections.

Select “Citizen DJ” under the “Explore the Library of Congress” tab to hear  these Citizen DJ sessions directly. Join the LIVE Q&A chat sessions to ask creator and Innovator in Residence Brian Foo questions about Citizen DJ and his work: Friday, September 25 from 3-5 pm and Saturday, September 26 from 2-4 pm.

 

Catch up on the Informal Virtual Audio Visual Summit

As you saw in last month’s newsletter, several units across the Library of Congress worked together to design and host an online conference for internal and external practitioners who work with audiovisual materials on September 15, 2020.

The event had over 400 attendees and over 30 speakers from all across the nation and world. In case you missed the impressive range of presentations, you can view the slides from all four thematic sessions (LC Share Out, Accessibility for All, A/V Makerspace, and Notes from the Field) on the LC Labs Event page: //labs.loc.gov/events/.

A captioned recording of the event will be available on this page in the coming weeks.

Curio

  • By the People celebrates its second anniversary! Read more about all this crowdsourced transcription program has been able to accomplish since its launch in 2018.
  • New from the Signal Blog: Digital Collections Specialist Marcus Nappier shares about how he learned to write a Format Description Document (FDD) in this recent post.
  • How are libraries and museums using visualizations to engage with digital collections? Recent Data Viz Society Nightingale journal post features LC Labs experiments among a list of projects from around the world!

 

Finding By the People Transcriptions in the Library’s Digital Collections

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Today’s guest post is from Dr. Victoria Van Hyning, who served as a By the People Community Manager at the Library from 2018-2020. Starting in Fall 2020, she will be an Assistant Professor of Library Innovation at the University of Maryland iSchool, where she will continue her research on crowdsourcing, outreach, and inclusion.   The […]

LC Labs Letter: April 2020

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LC LABS LETTER A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Editor’s Note As it did for many people across the country and all over the world, the month of March brought new ways of working and communicating and challenging, complex circumstances for the LC Labs team. We found […]

Newspaper Navigator Surfaces Treasure Trove of Historic Images – Get a Sneak Peek at Upcoming Data Jam!

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Projects like Newspaper Navigator are busy unlocking even more digital content for members of the public to access from home. On May 7th at 2pm EST, Innovator in Residence Ben Lee will host a virtual data jam to experiment and play with thousands of images—including maps, advertisements, comics, and more!—from historical newspapers dating to the 1800s. In this post, Ben discusses his aspirations for engaging the American public with the millions of images he extracted from  Chronicling America.

New Collaboration between LC Labs, British Library, and the Zooniverse

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Announcing preliminary details for Arts & Humanities Research Council UK-US Partnership Development Grant awarded jointly to the the British Library, the Zooniverse, and the Library of Congress. The project is titled “From crowdsourcing to digitally-enabled participation: the state of the art in collaboration, access, and inclusion for cultural heritage institutions.” Several opportunities to participate are described.

LC Labs Letter: December 2019

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LC LABS LETTER A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Keeping up with the Innovators This month, Brian Foo and Ben Lee came back to the Library to gather feedback from staff in the early stages of their project and to showcase working prototypes. Brian presented his project […]

Celebrating a year with By the People

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Celebrating the 1 year anniversary of By the People, the Library of Congress crowdsourcing platform that engages volunteers to explore and connect to Library of Congress collections while enhancing searchability, readability, and research use of digitized collections. In the last year over 11,000 volunteers have registered and even more have contributed anonymously to complete transcription of over 31,000 digital collection pages, with 55,000 awaiting peer review.

Announcing International Collaborations on Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions

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The following is an announcement from funding and cultural organizations from the United States and the United Kingdom about a new collaboration supporting digital scholarship.  The Library of Congress Labs team is co-hosting a workshop to kick-off international collaborations around digital scholarship. Partners in the UK and the US are coming together to collaborate on the […]

Let’s go! Explore, transcribe, and tag at crowd.loc.gov

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This is a guest post from Lauren Algee, LC Labs Senior Innovation Specialist. Connect with Lauren and her fellow crowd.loc.gov Community Managers Elaine Kamlley and Victoria Van Hyning via History Hub and on Twitter, as well as GitHub. What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, writings of Civil Rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell, or […]