Welcome to MicroPasts’ documentation

This documentation site will cover how to create, deploy, maintain and retrieve data for citizen science projects based around Arts and Humanities subjects.

Within this mkdocs instance, we have forked the original Pybossa docs and embellished them for use with AWS EC2 and our installation methods and project creation. We stand on the shoulders of giants at SciFabric.

The MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform was built as part of the MicroPasts project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and developed as a collaboration between the UCL Institute of Archaeology and the British Museum. The platform is now maintained by the main MicroPasts team (Andy Bevan, Daniel Pett, Chiara Bonacchi, Jennifer Wexler), together with other institutions, researchers and heritage professionals internationally.

The MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform runs on the Pybossa framework developed by SciFabric. Templates have been created so far by the project team and by collaborators, by elaborating on and modifying some of the templates already available in Pybossa. The MicroPasts templates are modular, this means that they are adaptable to the needs of different collections and institutions. So far the kinds of tasks that are supported by the MicroPasts templates are: transcription of structured and unstructured text; geo-referencing of find spots; classification of photographic material; and 3D photo-masking.

The framework we use (Pybossa), is described as:

PYBOSSA is a technology developed by Scifabric. It is used for the development of platforms and data collection within collaborative environments, analysis and data enrichment.

PYBOSSA is an extremely flexible and versatile technology with a multitude of applications that adapt to each specific case facilitating many of the daily tasks that take place in research environments such as museums, art galleries, heritage institutions, libraries of any kind, market research companies, hospitals, universities and all those organisations that manage data or require information from their customers/users -such as airports, shopping malls, banks, hotel chains, etc.

PYBOSSA’s simplicity consists in its easy adjustment to any areas using any of the available templates, this way every customer can then adapt it to their own needs.

PYBOSSA can import data directly from other products such as Amazon S3, Twitter, Youtube, Google Spreadsheets, Flickr, Raspberry Pi, etc. Through all these integrations PYBOSSA allows data capture for further analysis made by users in a transparent and easy way.