Get Involved

 

We need your help documenting the covenants! Each racial covenant needs to be verified by at least 5 people to confirm its racial language. These verified covenants will then be added to a map. Our team will host community workshops to discuss racial covenants, their role in racially segregating Milwaukee County, and the specific steps involved in being a volunteer.

Our methodology involves:

1. acquiring digital access to all deed images in Milwaukee between 1910 and 1960 (1.7 million image files);
2. converting image files to text with optical character recognition (OCR);
3. using Python scripts to flag deeds with racial covenants, uploading covenants to the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform;
4. holding community workshops to involve Milwaukee County residents in the process of examining racial covenants; and
5. geocoding and mapping covenants.

Take an online training to start transcribing.

  1. Go to Zooniverse and set up an account.
  2. Watch transcript training video. (coming soon)
  3. Let us know if you have any questions as they arise. This can be done via Zooniverse.

If you are interested in volunteering, please fill out the form below and we will send you more information about upcoming workshops.

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