Data for the ‘Science Gossip’ project
Shuttleworth S., Lintott C., O’Donnell J., Belknap G.
Through the Zooniverse platform, volunteer citizen scientists can access pages from a series of 19th century natural history periodicals and are asked to complete a set of tasks for each page. This creates metadata which can be used by historians and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The metadata relates to the illustrations hidden in the pages of the digitized periodicals, and by identifying the location, author, type of illustration and producing keywords, the Biodiversity Heritage Library can improve their image based search function and historians can assess a vast amount of information on unknown authors and illustrators from the Victorian era. The publication of books and periodicals are key locations for visualizing knowledge about the natural world. The Biodiversity Heritage Library has digitized and catalogued millions of pages of printed text between the 1400’s and today related to the investigation of the natural world. Illustrations are a large part of these printed pages, and we need your to help identify, classify and correlate them. The data created by tagging illustrations and adding artist and engraver information will have a direct impact on the research of historians who are trying to figure out why, how often, and who made images depicting a whole range of natural sciences in the Victorian period.