Want to Help Map Our Covenants?

Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to check out the Mapping Cville project. To learn more about how the project began and what we’re tackling, check out this first blog post here or some of the news items that have been written about the project so far: C-Ville Weekly, Charlottesville Tomorrow, VPM, Cavalier Daily, and NBC29.

While we have been busy, we definitely have a lot more ground to cover, which is why it’s so wonderful that you’re interested in helping. At this stage, we’ve scanned more than 95,000 pages of city property records, searching each of them for racially restrictive covenants: clauses that restrict their sale and ownership to white residents. We have found thousands of these deeds, and with each one, we’ve uploaded it to the website we’ll be using for data-entry: Zooniverse.

Computers are great for certain things, but with each of these property records we need human eyes (YOU!) to read through them and find 10 specific pieces of information. For each of these 10 tasks, you’ll:

(1) Read through the property record on the left side of the screen

(2) Find the information being requested

(3) Enter that information in the blank white box on the right side of the screen

(4) Click the “Next” button to reveal the next piece of information we need from that document

To help with this, there is a tutorial, a hint guide for each task, and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on the Zooniverse project site.

It’s all explained in a 5-minute video tutorial that I encourage everyone to watch, which explains how to use the Zooniverse program. You can find the video on the right side of the Mapping Cville home page, and also right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KinBF4p_iLE&feature=emb_logo

The Zooniverse project page where you’ll be doing all of your work and which I’d recommend bookmarking is here:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mappingcville/racial-covenants

As always, feel free to email me at jordyyager@gmail.com with any questions or thoughts. Thank you, thank you, thank you!