E-town Rave History Project Seeks Volunteers

E-town Rave History Project can't be done by one man

The E-town Rave History Project is growing by leaps and bounds. To use the lingo of software startups, it's time to "scale" the project.

I'm looking for volunteers to analyze the growing number of flyers, newspaper articles, and interviews in my collection. In some cases, you will be getting your hands dirty with primary source materials that haven't seen the light of day in 20 years.

Here is where we will start:

• You will receive a scanned flyer (example)... you will type all the words including DJ bios, schedule information, and any text.
• Or, you will get a scanned newspaper article (example)... you will use OCR to convert image to text, and correct the output.
• Or, you will get raw of images scanned flyers... you will crop the images and save them in accordance with a naming convention.

Things get interesting fast: the next tasks centre on linguistics and statistics. If you're interested in working with exclusive interview footage, that's on the menu too. See below for more details.

So I ask you:

• Are you a data nerd? 
• Are you good with language (spelling, grammar, punctuation)?
• Are you careful and precise? 
• Do you love the whole universe of techno -- from the 1980's on? 
• Do you want to actually MAKE history in Edmonton?

Find me on Facebook and get in touch.

---

From Data Entry to Making History

There are three levels of volunteer within the E-town Rave History Project:

• House Party volunteer
• Hall Party volunteer
• Rave Party volunteer

House Party

All volunteer researchers start at "House Party" level so I can gain confidence in your abilities as a researcher.

Typical "House Party" level tasks include: 

• You receive a scanned copy of a flyer to an Edmonton rave. Type all the words of the flyer into a text document in a consistent format. Then publish the document to the project blog.
• Or, you receive a scanned newspaper article about raving in Edmonton. Use optical character recognition to convert the document to text, then correct the output.

If you can demonstrate you are careful and precise with words and data, you can graduate to "Hall Party" level, which involves linguistic and statistical analysis of the source material above.

Hall Party

Typical "Hall Party" level tasks include:

• You receive a newspaper article as a text file. List all the nouns in the document; list all the verbs. List the speakers in order of appearance. Format your results and publish the analysis to the cloud.
• OR, you receive a scanned party flyer with all the text as a text file. Enter information such as party venue, ticket price, DJ names, etc into a database. Publish a "party summary" to the project blog.

Rave Party

Stay with me for long enough and I will graduate you to "Rave Party" level which is where the really interesting work is. 

Typical "Rave Party" level tasks include:

• You receive an audio recording of an interview. Use machine-assisted transcription to convert the audio to text, then correct the output. 
• OR, you receive a text transcription of an interview. Tag the interview using a pre-defined set of tags, then add those tags to a index of all interviews.

Interested? Find me on Facebook and get in touch.

Tweet