The Purposeful Gaming project has now ended and BHL is no longer utilizing outputs from the games created as part of this project: Smorball and Beanstalk. However, both games will remain live for your continued enjoyment. Learn more.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is hosting a 48-hour data correction event on December 7-9 2015. We’re enlisting the help of you, the BHL community, to help us complete 10,000 pages from BHL’s OCR output that we can then use as a training set to apply to the remaining BHL corpus.
Here’s how it will work:
On Monday December 7th we will begin the start of the sprint at 9am eastern standard time. You can help us meet our Data Dash goal of 10,000 pages by playing Beanstalk and typing as many words as you can within the 48 hour timeframe.
Beanstalk, designed by the award winning design lab Tiltfactor based at Dartmouth, is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to type the word they are shown on the screen. These corrected words are then re-ingested into BHL resulting in new and improved OCR. The more words that players type correctly, the faster the beanstalk grows, and the more contributions are made to BHL.
We will update players on how well they are helping us reach the goal by giving updates throughout the event via BHL social media. To make it more fun we encourage players to register before playing the game so that their scores can be tallied against other players during the event. (Please note: we will be resetting the leaderboards for the duration of this event but afterwards will restore the scores. i.e. current players will not lose their cumulative scores.)
Get to the top of the “Weekly” leaderboard by correctly transcribing the most words, and declare yourself the victor of vines!
Besides seeing your name on the weekly leaderboard, the top 3 players that remain at the end of the dash on Wed Dec 9th 9am EST will receive their choice of BHL swag – which include a selection of notecards featuring beautiful illustrations from BHL books; bookmarks about both of BHL’s games (Beanstalk and Smorball), and Smorball trucker hats featuring the beloved home team the Eugene Mellonballers.
While BHL swag is oh so sweet, we know the primary motivating factor for the BHL community will be improving biodiversity research and with every word you type you will be doing just that!
Why now?
The IMLS-funded project, Purposeful gaming and BHL, is coming to a close at the end of this year. While the games will continue to be available online beyond 2015, the project’s objectives – to demonstrate whether or not digital games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from OCR – need to be met which includes collection of a substantial number of text corrections via gaming.
So please won’t you help us to dash to the finish line to meet the number of data corrections needed to help improve the discoverability of historic biodiversity literature?
Play a Game. Grow a Beanstalk. Save a Book.
Patrick Randall served as the Community Manager for the BHL Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project at the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University from 2015-2017.
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