• The New York Times is digitizing ads from its old newspaper issues - you can help
    6 replies, posted
[url]http://www.cnet.com/news/help-the-new-york-times-sort-through-its-cool-vintage-ads/[/url] [quote=CNET]The New York Times has a century-and-a-half history. That means its archives are massive. While historic news stories are fascinating, you can learn just as much about a culture and a time period through the advertisements that ran alongside those articles. The Times has put out a call for help for volunteers to pore over and make sense of digitized versions of ads. The result is a project called Madison. It serves up random ads from the 1960s (more time periods coming later) and lets you comb through them. Madison offers up several different ways you can participate. You can identify ads, tag ads with product and company information or transcribe ads into searchable text. The New York Times wants volunteers to come back, so it has integrated some mild gaming elements into the work. You get a little progress meter that tracks how many ads you've processed and you get new designations, like "Fledgling Finder" or "Rookie Finder" as you keep going. It's kind of like leveling up.[/quote]
This is actually pretty cool. Hopefully the other decades will be out soon. I want to see some 80's and 90's stuff.
Finally those people who hoard thousands of old newspapers get to benefit from it.
This actually seems awesome. I do find it interesting how you can kind of get an accurate view on what America was like based on what advertisements you saw.
[QUOTE=Humbarger;46257841]Finally those people who hoard thousands of old newspapers get to benefit from it.[/QUOTE] You don't even need those thousands of old newspapers - the NYT will give you digitized copies to identify/tag/transcribe.
It's interesting how many companies are starting to use online curiosity and boredom for free grunt work.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46257857]You don't even need those thousands of old newspapers - the NYT will give you digitized copies to identify/tag/transcribe.[/QUOTE] I'll just continue to drown in them I guess
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