Measuring the ANZACs

##Project Description The Measuring the ANZACs project brings together an international team of researchers, community connections around New Zealand’s military history from the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the power of the Zooniverse community to explore, analyze, and digitize original World War I personnel files from Archives New Zealand.

Data gathered from Measuring the ANZACs will be used for three main purposes:

• To create a complete and rich index of persons who served in the New Zealand military in World War I and the South African War (also called the Second Boer War).

• To support academic research on the health of New Zealanders led by a team of researchers at the Universities of Minnesota, Guelph and Waikato.

• To provide an ongoing platform for historical and genealogical research on NZ’s World War I soldiers by citizens and scientists around the world.

##Documents Personnel files provide a thorough description of an individual’s military service from enlistment, through wartime, and beyond. The archival copies of personnel files reflect their working origins in multiple locations and compilation into one file at various points during and after the war. Thus, the order of documents within the files varies; a key part of this project is identifying what documents are present for any given individual.

Key types of documents within the files include:

Attestation Papers: Filled out at enlistment, these documents provide a rich description of an individual when he (and sometimes she) entered the military, recording their identity, social and economic status, next of kin, and health information. They also fulfill a legal purpose wherein the individual swears they will serve in the military and follow orders.

History Sheets: These papers record the major events in an individual’s military service, including embarkation from New Zealand, service in various theatres of war, wounds, sickness, capture and release as a prisoner of war, and death during the war.

Death Notifications: Created after the war, these papers were sent from the central office to the military to inform them of a returned New Zealand veteran’s death.

Archives New Zealand has digitized all of the pages in the personnel files, and we know the names of the individuals in a file and their serial number. Beyond that, we know little about the content of an individual file, and even what types of documents are present in the files.

##Data Volunteers can explore the pages of a personnel record in any order. Certain page types, such as the History Sheet, are formulaic documents that contain many of the same fields (e.g., name, unit) across different personnel records. The majority of the project's tasks gather data that the research team knows to be present in the files. However, this project also encourages volunteers to capture data the research team cannot predict, such as marginalia and unknown page types.

##Subject Sets
This project models a personnel record (all pages pertaining to an individual) as a subject set.

#Config

##Mark Workflow

The mark workflow guides volunteers through multiple-choice and multiple-response marking tasks. All marking tasks generate new subjects for the transcription workflow. The mark workflow contains one branching task. It is the first task of the workflow, in which a participant is asked to choose the page type of the subject. The answer given for the page type task will determine which chain of tasks to present next.

All marking tasks use the rectangle tool to capture the location of text fields.

##Transcribe Workflow

The transcribe workflow consists of single-field transcription and composite-field transcription tasks.

An example of a single-field transcription task:

        "dn_last_name": {
            "tool": "textTool",
            "tool_config": {},
            "help": {
                "title": "Transcription Help",
                "file": "basic_transcribe_help"
            },
            "instruction": "Transcribe the entry for **last name**.",
            "generates_subject_type": "dn_transcribed_last_name",
            "next_task": null
        }

An example of a composite-field transcription task:

        "att_transcribe_hearing": {
            "tool": "compositeTool",
            "help": {
                "title": "Transcription Help",
                "file": "basic_transcribe_help"
            },
            "tool_config": {
                "tools": {
                  "att_transcribe_hearing_r": {
                    "tool": "textTool",
                    "tool_config": {},
                    "label": "Transcribe the entry for **right ear**",
                    "generates_subject_type": "att_transcribed_hearing_r"
                   },
                  "att_transcribe_hearing_l": {
                    "tool": "textTool",
                    "tool_config": {},
                    "label": "Transcribe the entry for **left ear**",
                    "generates_subject_type": "att_transcribed_hearing_l"
                  }
                }
            },
            "next_task": null
        }

The only time branching is used in this workflow is when we want to collect several fields of data from a row in table.