Keynote at Stories of War Symposium

Attendees of the Stories of War symposium

Dr. Luther gave an invited keynote presentation at Vietnam War / American War Stories: A Symposium on Conflict and Civic Engagement, hosted by the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities at Indiana University-Bloomington. Other keynote speakers included included David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States; and John Bodnar, Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of History at IU. Dr. Luther’s presentation was titled, “Rediscovering American War Experiences through Crowdsourcing and Computation,” and the abstract was as follows:

Stories of war are complex, varied, powerful, and fundamentally human. Thus, crowdsourcing can be a natural fit for deepening our understanding of war, both by scaling up research efforts and by providing compelling learning experiences. Yet, few crowdsourced history projects help the public to do more than read, collect, or transcribe primary sources. In this talk, I present three examples of augmenting crowdsourcing efforts with computational techniques to enable deeper public engagement and more advanced historical analysis around stories of war. In “Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era,” funded by the NHPRC, we explore how crowdsourcing and natural language processing  (NLP) tools help participants learn historical thinking skills while connecting American Civil War-era documents to scholarly topics of interest. In “Civil War Photo Sleuth,” funded by the NSF, we combine crowdsourcing with face recognition technology to help participants rediscover the lost identities of photographs of American Civil War soldiers and sailors. And in “The American Soldier in World War II,” funded by the NEH, we bring together crowdsourcing, NLP, and visualization to help participants explore the attitudes of American GIs in their own words. Across all three projects, I discuss broader principles for designing tools, interfaces, and online communities to support more meaningful and valuable crowdsourced contributions to scholarship about war and conflict. 

The American Soldier in World War II launched on Zooniverse

On May 8, the anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, we launched The American Soldier in World War II, a crowdsourced transcription project featured on the Zooniverse platform. This project is the result of a year-long collaboration between Virginia Tech’s History and Computer Science departments, University Libraries, the National Archives, and Zooniverse, with funding by the NEH. VT History professor Ed Gitre is the PI. Dr. Luther is Co-PI and technical lead of the project, and Crowd Lab Ph.D. candidate Nai-Ching Wang is the lead developer.

Our launch included a transcribe-a-thon event at multiple physical and online locations and was based in the Athenaeum digital humanities center at VT. In its first 24 hours, the project attracted over 5,000 contributions. More photos of the event are available on VT Department of Computer Science’s Facebook page.

Thanks to our many collaborators and transcribers for making the event a success!

Please check out some of the publicity for the project to learn more: