About IESAISTIES.LV
IESAISTIES.LV (in Latvian – 'get engaged') is a digital citizen science platform for humanities and arts. It brings together various collaborative opportunities related to cultural heritage and humanities data, developed over recent years by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia (ILFA), in collaboration with various partners.
IESAISTIES.LV offers many ways to explore cultural, linguistic, historical, and musical materials through various forms of participation – studying, reading, viewing, and contributing. For example, you can help transcribe manuscripts, clarify information, or share your experiences and knowledge. You can also engage creatively – drawing inspiration from the old to create something new.
These collaborative opportunities are based on a vast collection of diverse information and extensive digitized cultural heritage materials, available in ILFA's digital infrastructure humma.lv, which also powers the ILFA's Digital Archives of Latvian Folklore garamantas.lv and the Latvian literature portal literatura.lv. Some initiatives invite you to create entirely new things, such as Voice Collecting Task Force balsutalka.lv, a project implemented jointly by the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Latvia, ILFA, the Open Technology Association, and the Latvian National Commission for UNESCO. This project invites everyone to preserve their voice samples for language preservation and the development of language technologies.
How to Participate?
Anyone is invited to participate in the citizen science initiatives at IESAISTIES.LV! In the middle of the IESAISTIES.LV website, various colorful elements are arranged, each leading to a specific activity within one of ILFA's digital resources. These could be individual platforms like “Centenary Wizards” or “Read Aloud”, or specific sections in one of ILFA's digital platforms, such as maps, audio, or autobiographies.
You can choose the form of participation, field, or type of material that best suits your interests by using the filters on the left side, which highlight activities that match your interests.
Why Participate?
To Help! ILFA holds and cares for a large amount of cultural heritage data, including the Archives of Latvian Folklore, one of the oldest and largest folklore collections in Europe, which is being digitized. There is a lot of data, it is growing rapidly, and information becomes outdated, but there are few staff members to work with this data daily. Therefore, help with transcribing manuscripts and clarifying information is crucial – it helps make the information more accurate, accessible to everyone, and easier to find online.
To Explore and Learn New Things! Participating in citizen science initiatives is an opportunity to better understand cultural heritage. IESAISTIES.LV includes information and digital objects that are unique and not available anywhere else. By transcribing old handwritten manuscripts, you might be the first to read them, and your participation will help make the information written on manuscript pages accessible to others. By studying maps, you can find out who was born, lived, or worked in your area, or what legends, proverbs, or beliefs were recorded there.
To Preserve! To ensure future generations know how we lived, celebrated holidays, and what we believe in today, ILFA invites you to participate in ethnographic surveys, providing answers to questions prepared by researchers. "ALF Asks" invites you to tell about holiday celebrations and other topics, preserving your stories for future generations. The Archives of Latvian Folklore invites you to submit materials for preservation in the archive that may be in your possession: song and memory books, written diaries and memories, spell books, and other materials suitable for the folklore archive, whereas balsutalka.lv invites you to preserve the sound of your voice.
To Share Knowledge! ILFA’s digital resources contain information about many people, their works, and places, for which very little information is preserved. Your knowledge might be crucial to make them more known! Sharing your knowledge about how you celebrate holidays and mark other days will help preserve today’s celebration traditions for future generations and contribute to research.
To Create! Citizen science initiatives offer the opportunity to learn from the past, enliven cultural heritage, include it in today’s cultural circulation, and better understand and learn through its application. You can listen to old archive songs and sing as heard in the recording or differently, creating a new version. You can also record your voice, reading century-old children’s poems, joining several other hundreds of readers.
Become allies of researchers – explore, learn, share, and create!
Contact: garamantas@lulfmi.lv
IESAISTIES.LV is developed and maintained by the University of Latvia Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art (LU LFMI). The development is supported by the project "Towards Development of Open and FAIR Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia" (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002) funded by the Latvian Council of Science and an EU ERDF funded project “Empowering knowledge society: interdisciplinary perspectives on public involvement in the production of digital cultural heritage” (Nr. 1.1.1.1/16/A/040).
Iesaisties.lv received European Union Citizen Science Award 2024: Honorary Mention