Abstract
Zeit.shift is an ongoing digital and citizen humanities project between Eurac Research (Bolzano, Italy), the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library (Bolzano, Italy) and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol (Innsbruck, Austria), which seeks to contribute to the preservation of the memory and cultural heritage of the historical region of Tyrol. The project focuses on historical newspapers written in German and mostly blackletter script, which are currently scattered across North, East and South Tyrol and are only partially digitised. The objective of the project is twofold: increase access to these historical collections by digitising some 500,000 pages of Tyrolean newspapers published between 1850 and 1950; and investigate the potential of citizen engagement as a means of enhancing and making these cultural assets more widely known.
As a "distributed intelligence" citizen humanities project, Zeit.shift does not include input from citizens at each step of the research but relies on their cognitive and observation abilities to enhance data, granting them the possibility of influencing changes in methodology, objectives, development, results and dissemination. Unlike most citizen humanities projects working with digitised historical newspapers, Zeit.shift endeavours to combine common citizen science tasks of georeferencing and data annotation, with the aim of leading participants on a trail of serendipitous discovery of the past.
The ongoing contributory initiative that most closely resembles Zeit.shift is Altes-Leipzig, a reconstruction of historical Leipzig made possible thanks to digitised archival documents and genealogical information provided by citizens.
The demo will consist of two hands-on activities. The first activity, already underway, makes use of the existing platform Historypin and invites citizens to geolocate and semantically tag newspaper advertisements to help recreate the economic landscape of Tyrol from roughly 100 years ago. The project seeks to leverage the captivating sense of nostalgia evoked by reminders of products, traditions, people or businesses from the past to crowdsource citizen knowledge for the purposes of both cultural dissemination and research. The second activity, currently under development, is a custom typing game designed to improve the OCR of unrecognised words. In the game, these blackletter words are attached to arrows that fly in the direction of Ötzi the Iceman. The goal is to type the words as fast as possible before they reach and kill Ötzi. When Ötzi dies, players are shown the scores for their contribution as well as the original newspaper page from which the killing word was taken, allowing them to explore its context.
Demo presentations will be in English. However, the activities, while primarily targeted at German-speakers, are open to all who have some knowledge of the German language. Demos are possible without supervision as they were designed for remote participation. The activities can be run on the participants' personal laptops without account registration, are both web-based and only need an active internet connection and a web browser (preferably Firefox or Chrome).