The Future of OWD

by ral104 moderator, scientist

Firstly, Happy New Year to everybody, and thanks for all the work you've put in on OWD over 2018. Together, we've completed 156,640 diary pages, which equates to 859 completed diaries.

The project's been running for five years now, and I think it's fair to say that our main focus during that time has been tagging, using the brilliant interface developed by Jim O'Donnell. We've seen one academic paper published based on OWD's data, and Steven Hirschorn at the National Archives has done excellent work in exploring how the data can be used to build up indexes, along with ways in which we might visualise the information contained in the diary pages.

However, things are changing. Zooniverse have developed new software to support all their projects, and will no longer be supporting the infrastructure that OWD runs on. This presents us with a significant challenge: in order to keep OWD running on the new infrastructure, we need to build a new interface. Zooniverse have done a lot of work to make this process an easy one, but so far I'm not certain it will be possible for us to recreate the rich functionality we currently have.

This raises a number of questions, the key one being do we need to do things exactly the same way? It might be possible to continue generating the same rich, useful data we have been, while simplifying how we do it. In another thread Jim asked whether we still need to collect location data for place tags, and it's possible that we don't. We may only need to collect place names from now on, and simply match them to location data we've already collected. We may not. I'm not sure yet, but it's a good example of a way in which I don't think the new software will support us, but also how it may not matter. There's a lot to think about.

It's also worth saying that OWD has been running as a predominantly volunteer-led project for the last several years. Like many museums, IWM was hit hard by funding cuts and their involvement fizzled out in the aftermath of that. We get a lot of excellent support from Steven Hirschorn and David Underdown at the National Archives, but there are also issues there in how compatible the data is with TNA's current systems, as well as the resource necessary to overcome those difficulties. On the community side of things, Cynthia puts an enormous amount of work into the forums and without her they would be considerably less useful. But the basic facts are that any major changes to the project will happen slowly, because none of us are working on this as our main job.

My own opinion is that as well as continuing to generate data, we need to put more effort into using it as well. I think that's the best way of renewing interest in the project, as well as demonstrating exactly how useful it is.

Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way of saying that the current batch of diaries will be the last on the current interface. That decision's been made for us, and there's not really much we can do to change it. I think it's very likely that the project will have some kind of hiatus while we work out exactly what to do next and how to do it. For that, I can only apologise. The effort you all put into this work is hugely appreciated, and in moving forward in a sensible way and starting to work with the data you've all generated a lot more, I hope we will make best use of everything you've done.

I'll post more updates as things become clearer, and I'd also encourage you all to join in this discussion and let us know your thoughts on the project and any ideas you have about it.

Thanks.

Rob

Posted January 8, 2019 11:25 AM