New diaries!
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by
Stork
Thanks for adding new diaries recently. I finished the previous batch a month ago, and in the meantime I've been doing Decoding the Civil War on Zooniverse, but it's not nearly as good as OWD. All you do is transcribe telegrams and codebooks, so you don't learn much. The pages come in random order, so you can't follow a story like you do here. If you place a question in the forum you're lucky if you get an answer, and the moderators aren't nearly as knowledgeable as the ones here on OWD. So, you have the best and most interesting project on Zooniverse by far.
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by
cyngast
moderator
I've done some work on Decoding the Civil War, too, and had very much the same response to it as you. Although the last time I worked on it I had a bunch of very interesting telegrams come up about things that weren't directly related to troop movements, which most of them seem to be about. There was a New York merchant who had become a blockade runner for the Confederacy and another one about someone who was a bigamist. Also some that covered post-war situations in New Orleans where there were riots.
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I also did some work on the projects for the Civil War and the ANZACS but much prefer this project . Although I did get answers when I asked questions.
There is much more interaction between people in this one. I also find the WW1 project much more detailed and interesting. Also the discussions boards with their different categories interesting and helpful. I particularly like the way in which the WW1 project is formulated - covering so many options when tagging the diaries and the helpful google map for places.
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by
cyngast
moderator
I've always received answers from the Civil War project, too, but they are not always particularly helpful.
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by
ral104
moderator, scientist
My experience is that these projects start off big and then tend to fizzle out later on. I think that's for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the material just doesn't live up to peoples' initial excitement when they first get involved in a project. Often the people who originally set it up move on to other things, and there isn't the drive from other colleagues to keep things going. In many cases it's also because the rate of initial engagement decreases very sharply and the tagging or transcription task just isn't going fast enough to make it worth continuing.
We've been really lucky on OWD in that we have such a fascinating set of documents to tag and, although it's not perfect, the tagging interface itself is still very good (in my opinion, at least). I think both of those things have been instrumental in us having such a dedicated core group of volunteers - people who have been with the project for a long time now and have probably produced a high proportion of the data we're collecting.
Every contribution to OWD is valued and appreciated, even if it's just tagging one page. But really it's that core group of taggers who are keeping the project moving along and making sure we don't lose momentum. I think it's really important that people don't feel all that work is just disappearing into a black hole, and the forum is the main way we can make sure that the project is an interactive thing and not just a one-sided relationship. I hope it's working 😃
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