Zeit.shift: driving citizens to Tyrolean historical newspapers

Zeit.shift is an ongoing digital humanities cooperation between Eurac Research (Bolzano, Italy), the Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann (Bolzano, Italy) and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol (Innsbruck, Austria) for the digital preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the textual heritage of historical Tyrol. Using digitised German-language historical newspapers as a use-case, Zeit.shift is, among other project goals, developing two participatory tasks—image annotation and text transcription—to increase citizen awareness of, and active engagement with, these collections, while exploring the potential of the tasks themselves as data acquisition tools for research. As of July 2022, results show 25 contributors for the annotation activity with 303 (geo)tagged images and 1,430 unique tags, and 288 played games from 241 unique devices to-talling 1,910 words transcribed for the web game.