Scottish Political Archive Launch New Crowdsourcing Campaign

The Scottish Political Archive are looking for volunteers to help with a new crowdsourcing project to fully transcribe and index their 2014 Independence Referendum Collection.

This project is jointly led by Dr Chiara Bonacchi (University of Stirling) and the Scottish Political Archive (Sarah Bromage), in collaboration with the UCL Institute of Archaeology, The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, and the British Museum. The associated researcher developing and managing crowdsourcing activities is Dr Elisa Broccoli.

MicroPasts is a free and open-source, crowdsourcing platform which supports online mass creation, enhancement and analysis of open data in archaeology, history and heritage. It aims to build collaborations between heritage institutions and citizens to study the human past together. MicroPasts was established in 2013 with seed-funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and has continued running ever since with input from some of its co-founders (Prof. Andrew Bevan, UCL, Daniel Pett, Fitzwilliam Museum, Dr Chiara Bonacchi, University of Stirling, Dr Jennifer Wexler, British Museum).

Dr Chiara Bonacchi said “This is an important activity to ensure that smaller heritage organisations like the Scottish Political Archive can continue engaging audiences during this difficult period of lockdown and in the immediate aftermath. Through this digitisation project, in particular, we hope to create data that will unlock new research on the political uses of heritage in the context of the 2014 Referendum.”

Dr Elisa Broccoli said  “We developed a first crowdsourcing application to transcribe leaflets from the Scottish Political Archive. We will follow it up with a photo-tagging application to publicly index photographs from the 2014 Referendum campaign and facilitate searches for specific people, places, objects. We are asking volunteer contributors to help with these tasks”

Archivist Sarah Bromage said “The Scottish Political Archive actively collected Yes and No campaign materials for the 2014 Independence Referendum.  We wanted  to find out what was happening at grass roots level in local communities; effectively what was being put through people’s doors, distributed at campaign stalls and displayed in shop and home windows. We ended up with nearly 3,000 photographs and many, many leaflets.  This new project allows us to make this collection fully accessible to researchers around the world”

Link to the transcription application: https://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/project/leaflets2014

For more information on the Scottish Political Archive www.scottishpoliticalarchive.org.uk 

For more information on the Micropasts https://crowdsourced.micropasts.org/

archives Written by: