About Who am I?

I am Masters student working in the Digital Libraries Laboratory under the supervision of Assoc Prof. Hussein Suleman at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. My research interests are in mobile technology development, improving the Learning experience for students specially in developing countries. In 2009 and 2010, I had the opportunity to work for the Host Broadcast Service (the offical broadcaster for FIFA World Cup Tournament). as a Commentary Assistant. I have worked the Department of Computer Science as a Tutor and Teaching Assistant. Also I am a passionate motorsport enthuasist, especially Formula 1 and Top Gear UK.

Masters Research Volunteer Thinking for Human-Intensive Digital Library Tasks

Abstract

Transcription is an important area in digital libraries because it is a technique used in preserving historical hand- written manuscript documents. Transcribing these documents is important in building new collections and enhancing the quality of existing heritage collections. These cultural heritage collections stored in old library buildings need to be stored in electronic format, which enables the dissemination and accessibility of the content via the Internet to the world, for current and future generations. For this project we use a crowdsourcing based solution for transcription of historical handwritten manuscripts and other services like metadata collection using the Bossa framework. This method has proved to be effective in certain research areas e.g GalaxyZoo, which is a project where volunteers classifty galaxies.

Aim of Research

This research is aimed at answering the research questions posed for the project proposal, these include:

• If volunteer thinking can be used to crowd-source intellectually-intensive tasks in digital libraries (liketranscribing handwritten manuscripts).
• How volunteer thinking compares to machine techniques when applied to the problem of transcription.

Link

Transcribe Bleek & Lloyd Project

Honours Research Inter-connecting Dspace and LOCKSS

Motivation

The first motivation for this project is the issue of preservation of content. Lots of content has been generated over decades and is still being made, the project aims to come up with a solution to preserve content. The second motivational reason is wanting to archive interoperability among digital library systems. Lastly, to promote the adoption rate of LOCKSS within the digital repository communtiy, as its mostly used as a preservation system.

Aim of Research

The research was aimed at answering the following questions:

• Is it possible to use a generic package format for batch and incremental import/export from various repository systems that is both accurate, efficient and secure?
• Is it possible to create an accurate and efficient batch and incremental import and export interface for LOCKSS, utilising the generic package format?

Link

LOCKSS and DSPACE

Publications Some achievements

Reviewed conference posters

• Mushashu Lumpa, Ngoni Munyaradzi and Hussein Suleman (2011), Interconnecting DSpace and LOCKSS, to appear in Proceedings of TPDL 2011, Berlin, Germany, 26-28 September 2011.

Talks More achievements

• 2nd London Citizen Cyberscience Workshop, London, England, 16-18 February 2012.
• CSC 1015F Lecture on Recursion

Projects Personal research

• IGU Journals Databse Project Integration of existing journal list into Wordpress.

• Berlin10 Project Configuring Joomla(CMS) for Stellenbosch University.

Contact How to reach me

• Email1: nmunyaradzi@cs.uct.ac.za
• Email2: ngoni.munyaradzi@gmail.com
• Twitter name: ngonimunyaradzi