Crowdsourcing Application
Our goal:
To build a public, open-source, crowdsourced, and geolocated database that documents the coupled relationship between ecology and human health, especially before the 20th century. The database includes events related to agricultural, biological, hydrological, and climatic stress, especially as pertaining to human populations and the ecological systems that sustain them.
We believe that knowledge of the timing, location, severity and ecological contexts of historical mass mortality events will permit and encourage a rethinking of health outcomes in the age before modern medicine. Moreover, geolocation enables data to be compared with other geolocated datasets, such as with historical demography datasets, imperial policy datasets, or those of the paleoecological drought atlases. To this end, we hope that the ecocrisis database will allow us to think differently about how government policy and practices contributed to mass mortality; how climate change initiated or drove mortality; or how food system economics might help to explain mortality events.
The crowdsourcing application is currently in an alpha stage of development in which we continue to add to features to the services, especially pertaining to geolocation. We are also seeking ways to build a separate data visualization and mapping interface.
Contribute:
We want your help! We are looking for coders and historians.
We also want you to add to the database and provide feedback.
How to use the crowdsourcing app
During the summer of 2022, with funds from the Data Science Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence at Binghamton University, we began to build a crowdsourcing application to enable researchers from around the world to upload data securely and reliably. The crowdsourcer uses the Angular platform along with bootstrap coding to create a polished UI and effective data transmission to the back-end Postgresql database.
User registration
Users must register before using the application. Only registered users can submit the forms. We encourage registered users to enhance their profile in our system in order to help validate and verify data submissions.
Source information
The submission of reliable and complete bibliographic information about the historical or archaeological source is critical to the success of this project. Source information is broken into two fields: source info and source location. The former calls for a full bibliographic record (ideally in Chicago Manual of Style) of the source. The latter refers to the location of the passage or image within the source. This generally resolves to a page or folio number.
Themes
The application allows users to select as many themes as are appropriate. Most data can be fitted into one of the twelve preconfigured themes. If your data is different, please a new theme by using the 'other' option.
Geolocation
Currently, geolocating records can be done only by means these two methods:
- By latitude and longitude: the user can simply add the point coordinates (in decimal degrees - datum WGS1984) of the event;
- By address: the user can choose an existing site, municipality, or even state in the database; or
Nevertheless, at the top of our 'to do' list is to geolocate by means of either a geocoder or a cartographic interface that allows users to drop a point on a map.