Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Corps Recruits People Amazon Turk Style
The Sunlight Foundation recently announced the creation of the Transparency Corps. Modeled after Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the Transparency Corps aim to make it easy to harness small efforts by enthusiastic volunteers to move forward efforts to improve government transparency. From the June 30, 2009 Sunlight Foundation press release:
“Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Sunlight created Transparency Corps as a new way for people to volunteer to make government transparency a reality,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “Now, when people ask ‘how can I help?’ Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information.”Right now there are two projects: Each time you complete a task, you get points. Those points add up and are how you move up the transparency leader board. I joined up to see what a task would look like. For the earmarks task I was presented with a PDF of a letter requesting funding for a local project and a form to the right of the letter to be filled in with data such as the quantity requested, title of the project and other requester information. You can see an example of one of the letters on ScribDB. I am curious to see how big they can grow their corps & see what projects they target over the next year. I love that they are grabbing structured data. This particular task is part transcription and part encoding and reminds me of some of the work being done over on Freebase.com. For an example of one of the datasets they are building, take a look at their U.S. National Register of Historic Places base or the Government Commons. Continue reading
Jefferson, cryptology, moose and the internet
Thomas Jefferson's been on my mind and in the news lately. Today, there was a fascinating article about Jefferson and the breaking of an unbreakable cipher in the Wall Street Journal -- Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code. Rachel Emma Silverman. Wall Street Journal, Thursday July 2, 2009. Don't miss the interactive graphics that describes the mysterious cipher sent to Jefferson by his friend Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and how the cipher was finally broken 200+ years later by Lawren Smithline, a mathematician who works with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses. This article comes on the heels of a June 25 NY Times pictorial thought-piece on Thomas Jefferson by Maira Kalman called "Time Wastes Too Fast". That there are over 900 comments is testament to both the power of Jefferson's life and Kalman's words and drawings. Last but not least, I just finished David Post's truly mind-blowing book, "In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace." Post's book is a juxtaposition between Jefferson's intrigue with large ungulates, the description and mapping of the natural world, and the state and natural history of the internet. Yes I know it sounds bizarre, but Post pulls of the juxtaposition expertly. I highly recommend this book. Continue reading
Welcome Jeanne Kramer-Smyth to the BOTM podium
Happy July everyone! This month we've got Jeanne Kramer-Smyth with us. Among other things, Jeanne is a blogger at Spellbound Blog, a really interesting blog about the intersection of archives, digital humanities, cultural heritage institutions and technology -- here's her full biography. Take it away Jeanne! We also want to thank Molly and Lori from the Internet Archive for being our guests for the month of June. They turned us on to a bunch of cool Archive-it digital collections hosted at the archive. We really hope they'll continue to keep us posted on the Archive's happenings. Thanks again Molly and Lori!! Continue reading
Jeanne Kramer-Smyth: BOTM for July, 2009
Jeanne Kramer-Smyth is the author of Spellbound Blog. A recent graduate of the University of Maryland's iSchool Archives, Records and Information Management program, Jeanne comes to the field of Archival Science with over 18 years of experience designing relational databases, creating custom database software and participating in web based software development. She has brought her great interest in information visualization, structured data and helping individuals find what they are looking for to her studies, personal research and writing. She is interested in the ways that access to government information can be improved -- especially ways that free structured government data can be reused, analyzed and visualized. Jeanne currently holds a position as a Metadata Analyst and SEO Coordinator within the Interactive Technology division of Discovery Corporation. She divides her time between doing search engine optimization (SEO) for Discovery's network websites and working on taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. Continue reading
North Carolina State Archives and State Library of North Carolina’s Web
The North Carolina State Archives and the State Library of North Carolina teamed up in 2005 to create Archive-It collections that collect, preserve, and utilize the state's historic and evidential resources so that present and future residents may better understand their history. This contributes to their overall goal to safeguard the documentary and material evidence of past generations for the education of all citizens and the protection of their democratic rights. You can find the North Carolina State Archives’ portal to their Archive-it collections here. The North Carolina State Archives and State Library specifically used Archive-It during the 2005 Archive-It pilot period to capture former Governor James Hunt’s website which they had been unable to obtain from other sources, and the site came down from the web shortly after they captured it. The Archives reports that it has gotten many requests for information from Governor Hunt’s website and being able to point folks to the website archives collection has elicited very positive feedback. They also captured then Governor Mike Easley’s August 2003 video message to President Bush regarding the closing of textile mills in North Carolina (these mills were very important to NC’s economy). The video is no longer available online due to a change in administration, so having it archived will ensure continued access. The Archives and State Library are now working to capture their current governor’s Facebook and Twitter accounts as a way to document elected officials use of technology to reach large communities with their message. -Lori Continue reading