digibyte - the Freedmen’s Bureau Project shows civic power of crowdsourcing
- Summary:
- This important project shows how the same digital work-as-platform models under ethical debate can be applied to the public good.
If there's one word I'm not likely to use with enthusiasm, it's crowdsourcing. But the news that family records for slavery-era African-Americans will be made available free online had me rethinking my cynicism. Digging into the project, I found an excellent example of using "on-demand" work models for the civic good.
As The Guardian reports, those African-Americans who want to trace their ancestry into the slavery era basically have no viable way to do that. After 1870, African-Americans were included in the U.S. Census. But prior to that, public information is scarce.However, there is a huge archival cache of such records, most of which belongs to the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau is an administrative body created by the U.S. Congress in 1865, in order to help slaves in 15 states and the District of Columbia become free citizens.
Up until now, none of these records of the Freedmen's Bureau have been available online. To get a look at them, you had to travel to Washington D.C. and sort through reams of handwritten records. But that's about to change, thanks to a collaboration of several organization who are actively digitizing 1.5 million handwritten records, which contain more than four million names. All the documentation should be online by late 2016, and easily searchable online.
The Guardian quotes Hollis Gentry, a genealogy specialist at the Smithsonian, who spoke at the project announcement event:
These are the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved. We get a sense of their voice, their dreams... I predict we’ll see millions of living people find living relatives they never knew existed. That will be a tremendous blessing and a wonderful, healing experience.
A trip to the Freedmen's Bureau Project web site shows how the affiliated groups organized this endeavor, and how interested readers can get involved. On the home page, you can watch a short "get started indexing" video. If you click on the "Volunteer Now" link, you're taken to a projects page, where you can choose from 100 indexing projects in 20 countries.
Each project shows a current status, and includes links to view details or to start indexing:
Some of the projects need heavy lifting, but the overall stats to date are impressive:
This important project shows how the same digital work-as-platform models under ethical debate can be applied to the public good. It also demonstrates how project transparency can provide a way for people in disparate locations to ramp up quickly, completing a manageable piece - while furthering an effort of massive scale.
Image credit: Business people holding soil with seedling © aluxum - Fotolia.com