Website used: Citizen Archivist on the Nation Archive Website, give it a try!
For my crowd-sourcing project I chose to use the one that was offered by the national archives website. The idea of crowd-sourcing I think is a pretty good idea. This is a way to include people who are interested in doing these type things without them even having to leave their home. That is the most important part is how easy it is for people to access the website and for them to help out with something that would normally take much longer because there would be less people working and checking the work. The only complaint that I really have about the website is that I think it should be made a little easier for the people who are trying to help. The setup of the website is the only thing that gets a little confusing.
I chose to do some work with the “Cuba” category because that fit best with my interests in history. I also chose this one because of the options I liked this best for transcribing. what i was able to do while i was on the website was transcribe a few paragraphs on the website. the process was not as easy as i expected it to be, I thought they would make it a little easier since this is for your average everyday person. I think they should have given more directions on what to do for certain instances, like if something could not be read, or if it is written in a way that it could not be typed.
I could see why a lot of people would choose this category more than others because it is easier to do. This category had more papers that were typed and easier to read than some of the other categories. The typed papers are definitely much easier to read than the other papers. Even looking at the original copies of the census we use in class and then looking at these papers it is clear why people would rather do this.
Like I said before I believe that this is a great idea to get work out of people who are willing to do it for free. Some might argue that you will get many mistakes from inexperienced people and you will get people are trying to purposely mess up the transcribing. I personally believe that the people who are doing the work correctly will out weight the people who try to mess it up. Plus I believe there is too much work to do to try to purposely mess it up.
