Wonder Tools — Be My Eyes, Zooniverse, More Love Letters and Blacklight
Simple ways to spend a few minutes microvolunteering during the pandemic, plus a free new tool for tracking your online tracks
Today I’m sharing a few cool things I’ve been trying out for microvolunteering, plus a new tool that shows how sites you use collect data 👀 about you as you browse online. 👁👁
If you’re new to this newsletter you can check out 20+ past posts here about a variety of tools I use and recommend for productivity and creativity. I’m Jeremy Caplan, a journalist and educator at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Be My Eyes
This terrific service pairs remote volunteers with people who need help seeing something. When I answered a volunteering request recently a live video image of a pan with sizzling pork greeted me. Someone with a vision impairment wanted to know if his meat was ready🍳. Given that I don’t eat or cook pork, I wasn’t 100% sure. I described what I saw. We chatted as he poked at the pan🐷. I watched and he smelled until we felt it was ready. Then we said our goodbyes.
That’s a typical microvolunteering experience on Be My Eyes, a terrific tiny way to connect with strangers during the pandemic. Here’s a 90-second video that explains how and why it works:
More Love Letters
It feels great to write an old-fashioned letter once in a while. It’s especially nice when you know someone will really appreciate it. Each month the site’s editors curate and post a new request. This month, you can send birthday greetings by Sept 30 to Marie, turning 90 in relative isolation at a nursing home in Tennessee. Visits have been restricted because of COVID-19, her son writes, describing other challenging circumstances. Or write to any of five other people described here.
Zooniverse
Another easy and enjoyable way to do some microvolunteering is to use the world’s largest platform for crowd-powered research. Here’s how it works. When you arrive on the site site, you pick a project that looks interesting.
Your role is to look at authentic objects of interest gathered by researchers. Depending on the project, these can include images of distant galaxies, historical records and diaries, or videos of animals in their habitats. You answer simple questions about what you see to help contribute to researchers’ understanding.
I recently transcribed a few names on index cards to support a research project involving biographical information written on 12000 index cards. I spent just a few minutes, but given that a million people use Zooniverse, projects can move forward quickly through the power of the crowd.
Blacklight
In “The High Cost of a ‘Free Website’” Aaron Sankin and Surya Mattu examined more than 80,000 sites for a piece published this week on The Markup, a nonprofit news site focused on tech’s impact on society. As part of its service journalism approach, The Markup created the free Blacklight, a simple search tool to see how any site you use collects data about you. They also published a great behind-the-scenes piece about how they made Blacklight. It’s part of a section called “Show Your Work,” an excellent model of journalism transparency, something sorely needed in an era of declining trust in journalism.
The Markup is hosting a free live online event tonight, Thursday, Sept 24 at 7pm ET to celebrate the launch of Blacklight with “art, movement, music, and a conversation” featuring Markup investigative data reporter and tool creator Surya Mattu and human rights technologist Sabrina Hersi Issa.
Thanks for reading! If you’re feeling overwhelmed with the start of fall, join me & one of my former students tomorrow, Friday, Sept 25 at 12:30pm ET as we discuss “Tools for Well-Being in the Age of Overload,” including some I wrote about here, plus some new sites, apps and books.