Get involved

WANTED: volunteers!

In order to disclose and network the Natuurkundige Commissie collection, we need volunteers who help us to train MONK. MONK is a state-of-the art handwriting recognition system, developed at the University of Groningen's Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE) group. It is able to recognize handwritten words and images in digitized scans. If you are interested in joining as volunteer, please send Andreas Weber an email. Currently, our volunteers work on the following 'labelling' projects:

Fieldnotes

The collection of the Natuurkundige Commissie contains around 8.000 fieldnotes describing the flora and fauna of Indonesia in the first half of the nineteenth century. In order to make the field notes accessible we need:

• volunteers who are able to label Dutch, Latin or German words in the field notes,
• volunteers who are able to identify and label species names, person names and place names.

Journals of Pieter van Oort (1804-1834)

Born in Utrecht in 1804, Pieter van Oort was one of the most talented Dutch draftsman of animals and plants in the early nineteenth century world. As member of the Natuurkundige Commissie Van Oort visited large parts of the Indonesian Archipelago. Until his death in 1834, Van Oort kept a detailed travel diary counting more than 1.000 pages and produced hundreds of stunning drawings. In particular Van Oort's drawings offer a fascinating insight into the historical ecology of insular Southeast Asia. In order to make the Van Oort diary accessible we need:

• volunteers who are able to label Dutch words and transcribe sentences,
• volunteers who are able to identify and label species names, person names and place names.