Citizen Science: How you can be an armchair archaeologist

If you’ve ever wanted to be an Egyptologist, but don’t fancy slaving away under the hot desert sun, new website Ancient Lives might just be for you. Launched this week, this citizen science website has put 140,000 previously untranslated fragments of papyrus online so that members of the public can help transcribe and catalogue them.The collection has already yielded several lost masterpieces, including the poetry of Sappho, comedies by Menander, and plays by Sophocles, as well as an unknown ‘lost’ gospel which describes Jesus Christ casting out demons. [caption id=“attachment_51647” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Cheops pyramid and the Sphinx at Gizeh. Three Lions/Getty Images”]  [/caption] It also throws light on day-to-day life for ancient Egyptians as James Brusuelas, Research Associate of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, explains on the Ancient Lives blog:

We find Aurelius the sausage-maker who takes out a loan for 9,000 silver denarii, a work contract giving the terms of employment of a public herald in sixth century Oxyrhynchus, Hymenaeus sends a letter via his ‘Ethiopian’ slave, and an edict of the Prefect Vestinus from 62 CE.

The cache was discovered over 100 years ago by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, excavators from Queen’s College, Oxford. Oxyrhynchus, “The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish”, was a wealthy regional capital 160 km south-southwest of Cairo. Under bureaucratic Greek rule it it produced huge amounts of paperwork which was periodically cleared out and dumped in the desert where dry conditions preserved it. The project is a collaboration between Oxford University papyrologists, the Egypt Exploration Society, and a team in Oxford University’s Department of Physics, headed by Dr Chris Lintott, which specialises in building ‘citizen science’ projects that allow the public to contribute to scientific research. Launched in July 2007, Galaxy Zoo was first of what has now become a suite of citizen science websites. Faced with the enormous task of classifying almost a million images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Lintott turned to the web and asked the public for help. Expecting the project to take three or four years, he was surprised when it completed in just three weeks. Galaxy Zoo is now a part of a wider citizen science project, The Zooniverse, which enables the public to watch for solar storms, find craters on the Moon, hunt for evidence of unknown planets, and search for icy objects in the Kuiper Belt. Recently, the Zooniverse expanded from its astronomical roots by launching  Old Weather, a project to transcribe the weather data in old ships logs so that it can be used to improve climate models. It uses the same techniques to encourage people to transcribe the Oxyrhynchus papyri. [caption id=“attachment_51648” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Photograph shows the Rosetta Stone, 1800s. The stone contains identical text in three languages, hieroglyphs, Egyptian, and ancient Greek, and was deciphered by French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion. Hulton Archive/Getty Images”]  [/caption] For the Ancient Lives volunteers, the transcription task has been made as easy as possible: users mark the centre of each Greek character that they can see on the fragment, then pick from the alphabet the letter which looks closest to what they see. Each piece will be seen by at least five people, so small mistakes aren’t important. Instead, the final transcription will pull together the most common letter choices to provide an accurate transcription. “250,000 images were served in the first 36 hours,” says Lintott, providing an indication of how fast this massive transcription task could complete. “We hope further efforts to photograph the rest will let us add to the online collection.” Oxford’s Sackler Library has 400,000 fragments from Oxyrhynchus. The papyri library isn’t the only thing that’s growing. With 10 citizen science projects underway, the Zooniverse team has proven without a doubt that the public can do meaningful science when given the tools. Indeed, the Citizen Science Alliance, a group of six major institutes with partners all over the world, has now opened a call for proposals from researchers who want to develop their own citizen science projects. This is an opportunity for scientists around the world to reach eager volunteers who can do tasks that computers can’t, such as sorting through images or assessing graphs. With modern science producing huge amounts of data, now more than ever we need citizen scientists to help make sense of it all.