Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550–1914, January 2021 - December 2023 & How Did We Get Here? Transitioning the Communities & Crowds Project to Zooniverse (Digital Intersections Around Science Collections – online conference sessions)

The first part, drawing on the Tools of Knowledge project, will explore how digital methods and tools can capture, model and visualise the ‘lives’, or itineraries, of scientific instruments. It will introduce Voyages in Time, a volunteer transcription project on Zooniverse.org created with Royal Museums Greenwich, which provides data on the movements of the Navy’s chronometers, and the project’s new semantically modelled database of Scientific Instrument Makers. Both show how digital methods can build on, enhance and find new audiences for data created by curators, instrument scholars and museum volunteers.

Part two will trail a volunteer-led Zooniverse.org project developed as part of the Communities & Crowds project. This uses a new collaborative approach to working with museum volunteers from local communities, using citizen science and digital tools. The session will discuss case studies from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, and NMS, which have worked with local volunteers to digitise photographic collections so that they can build their own citizen science platforms on Zooniverse.org.

Session participants can have a go at transcribing the Greenwich Chronometer Registers and explore the new platform developed and delivered by collections volunteers. It will be an opportunity to discuss how historians and curators can create digital resources and pursue volunteer-led digitisation/citizen science projects.