Zooniverse activity, March 2022

This is a copy of a post I wrote for the Zooniverse forum, sharing our progress with volunteers on our crowdsourcing projects.

We’ve set various lines of analysis running to work out which newspaper titles to look at next, working on a possible ‘locations’ task to get more fine-grained data about accidents to include in our exhibition and publications, looking into machine learning, and also revising the dictionary ‘senses’ used in the other major task we’ve been running on defining what ‘machines’ were. We’re super-busy behind the scenes!

It’s also reporting season so I’ve been compiling some stats on our projects here, based on unique usernames/’not logged in’ sessions in the workflow export from Zooniverse to March 1, 2022. I thought I’d share the good news:

‘Accidents involving machines’ workflows

• Find stories about industrial accidents (our first task) – 175 volunteers
• Annotate articles (add more detail about the gender and number of people involved) – 56 volunteers
• Accident victim age and gender (add more detail about the gender and number of people involved) – 41 volunteers. NB: the first three tasks were before we applied to be an ‘official’ Zooniverse project
• Find stories about industrial accidents (an updated version of the task with different titles) – 81 volunteers (mostly VMWare staff plus us testing, before an influx of volunteers between March 1 and 9)

‘What was a machine?’ workflows

• What’s that machine? Describe it! (transcribe text from articles that describes the machine mentioned) – 940 volunteers
• What’s that machine? Classify it! (match the ‘machine’ to senses from the Oxford English Dictionary) – 503 volunteers
• What’s that machine? Classify it! II (an updated version of the task with different newspapers and revised ‘senses’) – 734 volunteers

‘Ad or not’ workflows

• ad or not? (our first version of the task) – 645 volunteers (lots of app users here, I think)
• Ad or not (#20436) – 253 volunteers