Language of Mechanisation: annotated historical newspaper articles

Datasets created through crowdsourcing tasks created on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform by the Living with Machines ‘language of mechanisation’ project team. Building on earlier work classifying machines by function, we asked volunteers on Zooniverse 'how did the word x change over time and place?' and presented them with options for classifying the words coach, car, trolley, and bike with specific historical meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary. We chose these words because we thought they would yield interesting insights into changes in language over time. In addition to volunteer classifications, the CSV files contain metadata and automatically-transcribed text from articles in digitised 19th century British newspapers. These datasets can support scholarship in a range of historical and linguistic research areas, and research into crowdsourcing and online volunteering patterns of behaviour.