Ancient Lives

In 1896 Oxford University starting bringing home ancient Greek papyri from Egypt. But the sheer quantity of the bits of writing that made it home meant that even after a century, only 2% of it had been surveyed. To finally help expedite the process, Oxford University partnered with the Zooniverse Project to get ordinary people, just typical websurfers, to transcribe the vast collection of writings.

The way it works is anyone who has the inkling to contribute, need only sign on to Ancient Lives and begin examining scanned copies of original documents in Ancient Greek writing. The site even provides handy examples for anyone having trouble visualizing what a written Greek character might look like. Then, when you have successfully transcribed everything legible, it is saved and sent off into the ether for review by a "real" scholar.

Enlisting the help of visitors and webjunkies to further research - even if only in a superficial way, is by no means a new story. Web 2.0 has opened up not only the ability for a more in-depth interaction with the public, but also the expectation that an institution - especially an educational one - interact as actively as possible with constituents and people who have never and may never set foot through the door or donate a dime.

Projects like this, though, go a step further and bring ordinary people into as close of contact as possible with the past that the University would otherwise attempt to promote in-house or in a static presentation. By presenting materials in this fashion, the University will likely not get across an educational message that it wants, but it will create a new sort of experience for the public - one that helps broaden the scope of its scholarship.

As it is, one learns relatively little about what they are exactly doing, unless he or she goes digging into the website.  The purpose, too, why it's important to sit and try to discern centuries-old scribbles on papyrus need to be expanded on more overtly.

What do you think? How far do you think this site goes in creating an experience? What could they do better? What place do you think "crowd-sourcing" has in scholarship? Responses typed in Ancient Greek get extra brownie points.

References:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018848/Oxford-University-appeals-help-transcribing-200-000-ancient-Greek-letters.html