Massive WWI History Project Seeks Online Volunteers

Massive WWI History Project Seeks Online Volunteers to Create Public Database of Soldiers

An international team of researchers is using crowdsourcing technology via Zooniverse.org to collaborate with the public to uncover and release new information about New Zealand’s WWI soldiers.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (01/03/2016) — Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Waikato are seeking the assistance of everyday “citizen scientists” to help complete a huge new WWI history project called Measuring the ANZACs (measuringtheanzacs.org).

Measuring the ANZACs will create a complete database of all New Zealanders who served in World War I to support research by family historians, students at all ages, and scholars. Many New Zealanders know of ancestors who served in World War I but not much about what they did. With the upcoming centenary of major Western Front battles in 2016 now is the time many New Zealanders will be discovering the stories of World War I soldiers. Measuring the ANZACs community transcription of the records will open up New Zealand soldiers’ stories to new and larger audiences.

Measuring the ANZACs is also supporting scientific research. The creation of the large database about 140,000 New Zealand soldiers is part of an international research project about health and mortality in New Zealand. Researchers on the project use the military records to study how Māori and Pākehā health differed in the past, how childhood diseases affected men’s health in later life, and how the war affected the health of survivors.

Measuring the ANZACs launched in October 2015 via Zooniverse.org. The project relies on thousands of active volunteers from around the world to transcribe and index scanned personnel files from New Zealanders who served in World War I and the South African War. Once completed, the digitised images of historical documents held by Archives New Zealand will be transformed into a comprehensive database which will be searchable and available to all New Zealanders. The project is also partnering with Auckland Museum to include the transcriptions in Cenotaph, an online memorial to New Zealanders who served in conflict.

“This database will become a key resource for historians in universities, museums and the community,” says Evan Roberts, a New Zealander who works at the University of Minnesota where the website was developed. “For the first phase of Measuring the ANZACs we are transcribing key information on the attestation (enlistment) and service history sheets” says Roberts. “This allows us to measure important health information like height and weight at enlistment, and key events in a person’s service, such as whether he was injured or taken prisoner, where he served, and whether he had any misconduct incidents.”

Some information has already been complied. Professor Les Oxley from Waikato explains, “We have done 22,000 of about 140,000 files which we used for our height and weight project, which was funded through Marsden and Health Research Council grants.”

The research by Inwood, Oxley and Roberts has been published in international academic journals. They have examined how the height of New Zealanders changed from the nineteenth century onwards. New Zealanders were tall in comparison to Australians, Canadians and British men, but the team found interesting differences in Māori and Pākehā height in the early twentieth century.

“Māori and Pākehā men were the same height, on average, until about 1900” says Roberts. “But from 1900 to World War II, Māori men were up to an inch shorter, and then the gap closed again by 1970. Height gives us a fascinating picture of Māori and Pākehā health from an era in which few other records of people’s health survives. It helps us understand New Zealand society today, by showing how different things were only a generation or two ago”

“Although we collected more than 20,000 World War I records,” says Roberts, “for some of our questions that still wasn’t enough. The opportunity to partner with Zooniverse and Archives NZ to transcribe all the records, and make it available for generations to come was a once in a lifetime opportunity. We’re also partnering with Auckland Museum who can include the transcriptions in Cenotaph, an online memorial to New Zealanders who served in conflict”

Measuring the ANZACS uses crowdsourcing via Zooniverse.org to complete its task. Zooniverse is the world’s largest citizen science organization, and supports several dozen scientific research projects in areas as diverse as astronomy and papyrology. Zooniverse projects collaborate with volunteers, or citizen scientists, across the globe to review and analyze the colossal collection of war documents from WWI soldiers.

Lucy Fortson identifies and promotes research projects at the University of Minnesota work that stand to benefit from the help of Zooniverse’s volunteers. “We have vast quantities of data that computer programs cannot process automatically, so we rely instead on the human eye and its keen pattern recognition abilities. Crowdsourcing puts our projects in front of the 1.3 million people around the world who contribute to Zooniverse, giving us the extra resources we need to keep progress moving on our research.”

“The ethos of citizen science projects is that by many people contributing a little, we can tackle large scholarly challenges together,” says Roberts. “Citizen science requires academics to make their research process accessible to everyone, and gives the public a chance to participate in important research projects.”

Each piece of information is collected three to four times to increase accuracy. “Old handwriting can be hard to read” says Inwood “and many of these documents were filled out in the field, so some of them are a little challenging to decipher.”

“Much of the information on the documents is hard to access without further transcription and indexing,” says Roberts. Over the next few years citizen scientists will classify document types within personnel files, and transcribe key information about the ANZAC soldiers like: names, next of kin, jobs, birthplaces, health at enlistment, and other key events in the soldiers’ service.

Oxley and his colleagues would like to see more citizen scientists of all ages participate so that they can release the records of men who served in France before a September 2016 commemoration of the War in France that will be held in Wellington.

“If every New Zealand high school student worked on the record of just one soldier this autumn we would be two-thirds of the way to completing the Measuring the ANZACs data” says Roberts. “Seeing the lives of these men on the page is a tremendous way for students, their parents, and everyone else in the community to understand what World War I was like.”

Roberts says, “Participating in projects like the ANZACs can help history come alive, especially for young people.” He and his colleagues are developing lesson plans for teachers to use in schools, and are keen to talk to schools and community groups about the project. “This is a great example of how people of all ages get the opportunity to interact with history. The sooner we can get these documents indexed, the sooner we can get all of this information out to people looking into our history.”

About the research team: Evan Roberts (University of Minnesota) is a New Zealander who studied at Onslow College in Wellington, and Victoria University before taking a Fulbright scholarship to the United States in 2000. “My first project in School Certificate History was interviewing a man in our neighborhood who had served in World War II” says Roberts. “I’ve always found historical stories about individual lives fascinating,” he says, “but being interested in Maths and Statistics as well, I wanted to find ways to tell stories about changing lives on a large scale.” “I left New Zealand to study at Minnesota because I was interested in working with large historical datasets” says Roberts. “New Zealand burned its census manuscripts, so I had to go overseas to work with this kind of material.”

Roberts taught at Victoria University from 2007 to 2011. “When I returned to New Zealand, the World War I soldiers’ files had just been released to Archives NZ, and Kris Inwood, Les Oxley and I were able to get stuck in building our database of records.” Roberts returned to teach at the University of Minnesota, and says “the opportunity to work on this large project with NZ records, and bring together the data team from Minnesota with Archives NZ and Auckland Museum is an incredible professional and personal opportunity. The chance to create a lasting memorial and research resource for New Zealanders and others around the world is very special. Talking with people whose relatives served, it is clear how much of an impact WWI had on NZ society.”

Professor Les Oxley (University of Waikato) is an economist and econometrician at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Born in the north of England, he spent 19 years at the University of Edinburgh, moving to New Zealand in 1996. His research interests are broad, including time series econometric theory, environmental history, scientometrics, economic history and the economic drivers of innovation. Les relaxes by walking his dogs, gardening, looking for the latest gadgets (especially those that are crowd-funded) and travelling.

Kris Inwood is a historian and economist at the University of Guelph who examines economy and health for indigenous and settler populations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. His most recent work, Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources (McGill-University Press 2015) builds on collaborations with family historians and combines genealogical and scholarly analysis.

Publications (Please contact us for copies of any publications)

Inwood, Oxley and Roberts, (2015). “Physical growth and ethnic inequality in New Zealand prisons, c.1860-1975”. History of the Family, 20(2): 249-269.

DOI: 10.1080/1081602X.2015.1006653

Evan Roberts and Pamela Wood (2014) “Birth weight and adult health in historical perspective: New evidence from a New Zealand cohort, 1907-1922.” Social Science and Medicine, 107(April): 154-161. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614001191

Inwood and Roberts (2010) “Longitudinal studies of human growth and health: A review of recent historical research” Journal of Economic Surveys, 24(5): 801-840.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6419.2010.00643.x/full

Inwood, Oxley and Roberts, (2010) “Physical stature and its interpretation in nineteenth century New Zealand” Australian Economic History Review 50(3): 262-283.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8446.2010.00305.x/full

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