The Lab worked in collaboration with Canterbury Museum on a crowdsourcing project with the G. R. Macdonald Dictionary of Canterbury Biographies held by the museum. The Macdonald Dictionary, presented to Canterbury Museum in 1964 and comprised of over 22,000 index cards, provides an extensive collection of biographical information the Canterbury region. The Dictionary, however, lacks indexed information on women, as the biographical cards were traditionally organised by the male heads of the households. The project used the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse to enrich the data of these biographical cards, and properly index the women’s names featured in the Dictionary.
The transcription phase of the project is now complete, and we are working with the Museum to add the enriched data to the Dictionary.