The Making and Knowing Project is an educational and research project that has employed citizen science to produce a digital critical edition of the 16th-century manuscript BnF Ms. Fr. 640, along with accompanying educational resources. Situated within a historiographical turn centered around materiality and practical making, the Making and Knowing Project, led by Pamela Smith, explores the tacit knowledge of early modern artisans and practitioners. A major component involves the recreation of historical recipes in educational laboratory settings, documented in the form of essays. The other central component is the digital critical edition of the anonymous French technical tract, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. The first version of the edition and website was completed during the initial funding phase by 2020. Further funding has supported continued development of the edition and related outputs, such as a teaching companion and the digital scholarly editing tool Edition Crafter. Making and Knowing is a flagship project in historical recipe research and in the application of experimental methods in the history of science and knowledge.
The Hannah Arendt Kritische Gesamtausgabe is a critical edition aiming to provide a comprehensive and accurate collection of the works of Hannah Arendt. As an ongoing project, it seeks to give scholars access to both published and unpublished writings, with new materials being made available over time. The project is conceived as a hybrid edition, combining both print and digital publications. It is a fundamental resource for the Arendtiani studies, enriching the corpus with unpublished materials from international archives. The review assesses the project against Scholarly Digital Editions (SDE) criteria, highlighting its academic importance and limitations. The edition represents a significant contribution to the dissemination and understanding of Arendt’s thinking, promoting a dialogue between tradition and innovation.
Crowdsourcing.wien is a digital platform launched in 2022 by the Wien Museum and the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus to involve the public in transcribing and indexing historical documents. Originating from a pilot project on postcard transcription, the platform now hosts multiple initiatives, including letter transcription and metadata extraction from historical theater playbills. This review outlines the platform’s development, user interface, and collaborative mechanisms such as multi-step validation. While it effectively integrates user contributions into institutional collections, issues remain regarding data accessibility, licensing transparency, and restrictive privacy protocols that limit genealogical research. Overall, crowdsourcing.wien represents a valuable model for participatory cultural heritage preservation.
#everynamecounts is the largest crowdsourcing initiative of the Arolsen Archives - International Center on Nazi Persecution. Since 2020, more than 170,000 volunteers have been recording more than 7 million digitized index cards and lists in a structured way. The platform provides an outstanding digital process that is well thought out and optimized down to the smallest detail. As compelling as the crowdsourcing aspect is, it is difficult to evaluate #everynamecounts as a text or data edition: So far, the project website does not provide access to the research data generated by the volunteers. The reviewer is also not aware of any research project based on the results of #everynamecounts. It is to be hoped that this impressive ‘digital memorial’ will not only remain an educational and outreach project that provides the general public with direct access to historical sources in order to gain a first-hand understanding of the murderous system of the National Socialists rule, but will also form a comprehensive basis for innovative, data-driven research.
In 2011, the New York Public Library began indexing a portion of its menu card collection from the Buttolph Collection through a crowdsourcing project. The goal of the project, What's on the Menu, was to record the dishes and prices on the digitized items in addition to the metadata provided by the library. The participation process was designed to be as low-threshold and simple as possible. The review scrutinizes the aims, approaches and deficiencies of the project, which unfortunately was discontinued in 2016.
