Tim Sherratt and I have begun a new project called ‘Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy’, which Tim boldly announced on his blog a few weeks back. Inspired by projects such as London Lives, Mapping our Anzacs and the National Library’s Australian Newspapers, we think there’s the potential for something really very interesting to be done with the early 20th century restricted immigration records that were created because of the White Australia Policy. The records document thousands of non-white people, mostly Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Syrians and Afghans, who were living in Australia at the time.

The records include two particular forms that are rich in personal information – Form 21, Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) and Form 22, the application for a CEDT. They include details such as name, date of birth, birthplace, places of residence, occupation, marital status and family situation. They also feature front and side portrait photographs and handprints.

The first thing we’re planning to do is to develop a crowdsourcing tool to transcribe information from these forms – with the hope that we’ll then be able to create connections between the people in the records (e.g. matching husbands and wives, children and parents, cousins, neighbours etc), as well as creating links between different groups of records that document the life of one individual (e.g. CEDT applications and case files, alien registrations, naturalisation files, birth death and marriage records, census listings, cemetery records etc).

We’ve got some ideas for how the initial tool might work, who we’d like to participate (both as our crowdsourcing community and as institutional partners), and other records that we could, in the long-term, be working with too.

So, I’m thinking that a THATcamp conversation about this might go either of two ways. We could brainstorm ideas for the tool itself, thinking about all the nifty things that it could possibly do. Or we could talk about the idea of building a community around the project – how do we create something that people will want to contribute to and how do we reward them for their efforts?