Stereovision

Welcome to the Stereovision Zooniverse project and thanks so much for choosing to help us with our research! We are a group of volunteer researchers from National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland, and our aim is to improve accessibility to the Museums' collection through citizen science.

The project focuses on a subset of the Howarth-Loomes collection of stereographs (stereos for short), which includes over 11,000 stereos from the 19th century. The subset we are working on depicts the International Exhibition of 1862 and includes stereos of scenes of the Exhibition building and of the objects on display, from fine art to industrial machinery, from the UK and across the world.

The overarching aim of our project is to improve the accessibility and searchability of this collection of stereographs and improve the depth of information in our collections catalogue. Currently, our catalogue entries for the stereos include information on the stereos as objects in the collection, but almost no information on the objects and scenes depicted in the stereos themselves.

For example, a stereo that depicts a piece of farming machinery, might not come up for a researcher searching the museum’s collection catalogue for objects related to farming, because the word is not included in its catalogue entry.

Additionally, our website currently does not include text descriptions such as alt-text for digitised (photographed or scanned) objects, making them inaccessible to users with visual or cognitive disabilities.

Ways to contribute

If you decide to take part in our project, the tasks under the workflows will ask you to provide classifications and write descriptions of the stereos, based on text on the borders of the stereos and on the images themselves.

You are also more than welcome to use the Talk section to contribute your own perspective, knowledge, and research on the collection. As an example, questions that have come up in our discussions while working on this project include:

What is the provenance of objects displayed in the Exhibition? Through what means might they have been acquired?

What does the Exhibition, and by extent the stereographs, tell us about how the UK wanted to present itself to the world?

Where are the objects now? Can they be found in current collections of museums and institutions in the UK and across the world?

Content warning

While we have not come across any stereographs that could be considered offensive, they capture images and ideals from the heights of Britain’s colonial empire era, and so may depict or endorse the outdated principles of that time. Some of the objects depicted in the stereographs, particularly those from other countries and cultures, do not include the context of their origin such as their cultural significance or their makers’ names. If you are interested in exploring and discussing these issues more, we invite you to join the Talk pages to discuss.

Communities & Crowds

Stereovision is part of the AHRC-funded Communities & Crowds project. Read more about it here.