#crowdsource mapping

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The day I was supposed to join a group of young women to map Gros Islet, an old fishing village on the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia, I got lost. Proann Francis, who was helping lead the expedition, had told me to meet everyone at Care Growell School, which Google Maps informed me was some 8,500 miles away, in Uttar Pradesh, India. “Where?” I asked. She instructed me to wait outside my hotel for a ride because it would be impossible to find the place on my own. An hour later, I found myself standing at the side of a dusty St. Lucian highway as a vintage red Toyota van pulled up. I squeezed in, between Francis and the driver. Behind us, a group of young women sat wearing matching light blue shirts that read “Women Mappers.” 

“We have some heavy mapping to do today!” Francis announced, breaking into a toothy smile, her dark hair pulled back neatly into a bun. 

Most of St. Lucia, which sits at the southern end of an archipelago stretching from Trinidad and Tobago to the Bahamas, is poorly mapped. Aside from strips of sandy white beaches that hug the coastline, the island is draped with dense rainforest. A few green signs hang limp and faded from utility poles like an afterthought, identifying streets named during more than a century of dueling British and French colonial rule. One major road, Micoud Highway, runs like a vein from north to south, carting tourists from the airport to beachfront resorts. Little of this is accurately represented on Google Maps. Almost nobody uses, or has, a conventional address. Locals orient one another with landmarks: the red house on the hill, the cottage next to the church, the park across from Care Growell School.

Our van wound off Micoud Highway into an empty lot beneath the shade of a banana tree. A dog panted, belly up, under the hot November sun. The group had been recruited by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, or HOT, a nonprofit that uses an open-source data platform called OpenStreetMap to create a map of the world that resembles Google’s with one key exception: Anyone can edit it, making it a sort of Wikipedia for cartographers.

The organization has an ambitious goal: Map the world’s unmapped places to help relief workers reach people when the next hurricane, fire, or other crisis strikes. Since its founding in 2010, some 340,000 volunteers around the world have been remotely editing OpenStreetMap to better represent the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and other regions prone to natural disasters or humanitarian emergencies. In that time, they have mapped more than 2.1 million miles of roads and 156 million buildings. They use aerial imagery captured by drones, aircraft, or satellites to help trace unmarked roads, waterways, buildings, and critical infrastructure. Once this digital chart is more clearly defined, field-mapping expeditions like the one we were taking add the names of every road, house, church, or business represented by gray silhouettes on their paper maps. The effort fine-tunes the places that bigger players like Google Maps get wrong — or don’t get at all.

[googlemapsuserimages]

dollar general; oil city, pennsylvania. stephanie jay, december 2022.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/NgU7F4z4EUcPcP9f7

[reenoon]

Week 12: Crowdsourcing in times of crisis

While social media is convenient, it also causes many problems. However, it can sometimes be a tool that saves lives.

Crowdsourcing is a method of gathering information and ideas from an unspecified number of people through social media and the internet to solve problems.

Source:(Noto Peninsula Earthquake: Emergency Support | News / Report | AAR Japan | Association for Aid and Relief, Japan n.d.)

When the Noto Peninsula earthquake struck Japan on January 1, 2024, social media became a lifesaving tool.

A person in Suzu City, Ishikawa Prefecture, posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Power outage. Can't use the phone. I'm here.” A few minutes later, users who saw the post shared emergency phone numbers and maps of the nearest evacuation centers, and the person was rescued.

This is precisely what we mean by crowdsourcing in times of crisis (utilizing collective intelligence in times of crisis).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SNS and map apps were not originally designed as disaster response tools. However, depending on how they are used, they can serve as infrastructure for citizens to share information in real time during emergencies.

In times of disaster, we digital citizens are not only “consumers of information,” but also “sensors,” “relayers,” and sometimes “supporters.”Taylor (2023)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source:  (NHK広報局 2025)

Japan has evacuation maps for each region, but NHK's national hazard map collects data provided by the government and local authorities, visualizes the risk of flooding for each location, and shares it as a basis for residents' decisions in times of sudden disaster.

However, not all information on social media is necessarily accurate. In the past, there have been cases where false information about bridges affected by landslides was spread. It is our responsibility to carefully evaluate the reliability of such information.

What we can do

・When sharing information, make sure it is accurate before posting.

・Posting with hashtags and location information will make it more likely to be seen by many people.

What not to do

・Avoid posting personal information as much as possible.

・Avoid posting sensational videos.

・Do not share ambiguous information.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reference

 Meier, P.（2015）Digital Humanitarians. CRC Press.

NHK広報局 2025, デジタルマップを用いた災害報道「災害情報マップ」開発のオモテとウラ, <https://note.com/nhk_pr/n/n293f4b130dec?utm_source=chatgpt.com>.

Noto Peninsula Earthquake: Emergency Support | News / Report | AAR Japan | Association for Aid and Relief, Japan n.d., aarjapan.gr.jp.

 Taylor, H.（2023）Crowdsourcing in Times of Crisis. Swinburne University Lecture.

[newstodayjournal]

Queering the Map Is a Crowdsourced Archive of Queer Memories

Name an L.G.B.T.Q. landmark. Perhaps it’s the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Manhattan. Maybe it’s Castro Camera, Harvey Milk’s shop in San Francisco, or even the Coral Sea Islands, where activists started their own micronation to advocate the legalization of gay marriage in Australia. All three places appear on Queering the Map, a digital atlas that invites L.G.B.T.Q. people to tag any…

[katmaibearfan]

New To The Bear Cams? Start Here!

This is not a complete guide -- check my pinned post for more in-depth information! My Bear Terminology I Use and My Tagging System Explainer posts are both going to be helpful for people seeking more information.

So, like, how do the cams work?

First, a link to the bear cams, so you know where to find them. Next -- there are many cameras located around Brooks River, and there is a handy labeled map here. There are six main bear cameras -- three cameras near the waterfall, Brooks Falls (BF), Brooks Falls Low (BLF) and Riffles (RF), and three cams downriver, Kat's River View (KRV), River Watch (RW), and the Underwater Salmon Cam (UW). In addition, there is a camera on Dumpling Mountain (DM) that has a lovely view of the whole Brooks Camp area, and a camera on the Naknek River (NR) that sees beautiful sunsets during bear season and beluga whales in the off season! You can switch between these cams by clicking on the one you want to move to -- they're located under the livestream you're currently watching.

The cameras are controlled remotely by volunteer camera operators for Explore, called CamOps. They do not read chat during their shifts, so don't tag them in anything or try to tell them what to do. They are trained, they have guidelines they must follow, and they have a lot of experience doing this -- the Katmai CamOp positions at Explore are highly coveted, and they have to work on other wildlife cams for a while before they are allowed to work the Katmai cams. They'll post in chat when the shift changes, so give them a heartfelt "thank you!" for donating their time to let us see all the lovely things these bears have to offer!

The cams are hosted on Explore.org, which has so many other livestreams! i only really frequent the Katmai Cams, but I do pop in to check on the Walrus and Puffin cams from time to time! Though you don't need an account to watch any of the cams, I highly suggest making one -- especially if you want to take snapshots! If you are logged in, any snapshots you take will automatically be saved to your gallery on explore, so you don't even have to download anything!

In addition, being logged in means you can comment in the chat underneath the livestream, though you can view comments without an account. This is helpful for lots of reasons, but especially for identifying bears and getting answers to any questions you might have. Don't be anxious, come say hi -- We're all here because we love these bears, and we're always happy to see new faces! There are a few folks in the explore chat who are incredibly good at identifying bears. Genuinely, I am an amateur, and a lot of the IDs I post here are crowdsourced from them.

The shape of the season

June is when the cams turn on, and it's quiet -- the bears are returning to the area after hibernation, so they're still sleepy, and the salmon haven't arrived yet. Sows that gave birth over the winter will return with their brand new spring cubs, and sows who enter into estrus will emancipate any cubs they have. It's also mating season (more on that later), which means fighting, playing, courting, and mating are all common. Oh, and the bears will generally look skrungled -- this is because they are shedding out of their winter coats and into their summer ones.

July is hectic -- the salmon arrive, and with them, a ton of activity. The run comes in pulses, slowly increasing in size and frequency until it hits a crescendo and then tapers off again. You can expect up to 30 bears to be at the falls during the peak, all feasting on the hundreds of thousands of salmon that descend upon the river! As the summer days in Alaska are very long -- Katmai peaks at about 18 hours and 20 minutes of daylight on the solstice -- you can find active bears on the cams essentially whenever during this time. Most subadults and sows with young cubs stay in the lower river because it is less crowded, and therefore safer. Up at the falls, you can expect to see lots of boars and single sows, with the boars frequently arguing and fighting over the best fishing spots.

August is quiet again. The salmon are almost completely gone, so many bears leave to go fish elsewhere -- "August Walkabouts", we call them -- and some bears who leave during this time may not come back again until next season. The ones who stick around spend their days fishing what they can, playing, and resting after the chaotic, salmon-filled month they just had.

September is the Fall Feast -- the bodies of the salmon who have spawned and died begin floating downriver. These salmon are not as nutritious as the ones caught in July, but they are still food, so the bears do still eat them. Many (but not all) bears return from their walkabouts, and other bears appear for their first visit of the season. Most of the action here is in the lower river, where you may see some bears diving for fish. Its still slower and less crowded than July, but its more activity than in August.

October sees the end of the fall feast, and the beginning of hibernation season. The bears who are still around will mostly just be chilling & hanging out. there could be some epic nap sessions, or late-season playing. Subadults and Sows with cubs will be the first to go to den, followed by sows without cubs, and finally the boars. Also, October is generally when Fat Bear Week happens, so keep an eye out for that!

By early November, most of the bears will have gone to den, the cams will shut off, and a season of bear watching will conclude once more.

Coat Changes

The bears will, broadly speaking, start the summer much lighter than they end up being by the time fall rolls around. As a result, many bears will look totally different in June than they do in September. Some bears, like 128 Grazer, may only darken a bit or darken unevenly, but others like 903 Gully or 131 Marshmallow will darken a lot. This change will happen slowly, over the course of the summer. This means that bears that stay around for August are pretty easy to track through these coat changes, but bears who leave and then come back in September can be tricky to identify if you aren't familiar with what their fall coat looks like.

If you want to know what a specific bear looks like in early summer vs fall, I suggest looking through my tag for them and taking note of the dates on the post. All bears are tagged by their number, and separately by their nickname (if they have one). For example, 131 Marshmallow is tagged both "#bear131" and "#marshmallow", but 856 is just tagged "#bear856".

Bear Pregnancy, Mating, and Cubs

Cubs are born in mid-winter, roughly late January to early February, while their mother is hibernating. They are very small when they are born, about 1 pound (0.45kg). By the time we see them on the cams, they have already done quite a lot of growing!

But how do we end up with cubs? Well, its quite different from human pregnancy! Mating season is in June, and during this time you will likely see boars following after sows. A sow in estrus gives off pheromones that alert boars to their presence, and boars who are interested will begin following that scent. This courting chase can last for quite a while -- sometimes up to a week -- with the boar following close behind the sow. Sometimes a sow may even approach a boar, seemingly asking him to follow her.

Sows and boars both will mate with multiple partners during mating season, and though some particularly dominant boars may attempt to keep a particular sow from mating with anyone else for the duration of her estrus period, they usually are not successful. As a result, cubs from the same litter may have different fathers!

Though mating season is in June, a phenomena known as delayed implantation means that sows don't actually "become pregnant" until after they go to den for the winter -- and only if they have enough fat stored for them and their potential cubs to survive the whole ordeal. In addition, heavier sows tend to give birth to larger litters, with the largest sows having litters of up to 4 cubs!

Fighting

There's gonna be bear fights. Sometimes the bear fights get nasty. Usually, the bear fights are between adults, most often boars, but adult boars do sometimes attack, and occasionally kill, cubs. You can see my trigger tag policy here.

For the livecams themselves, though -- CamOps will not shy away from violence. In fact, you can generally expect them to focus on violence when it happens, so if you see a fight starting and don't want to see it, you should probably move to a different camera! While many fights between adults end with "only a few scratches" (which may still be big enough to scar), some fights will end with nasty looking injuries that can leave big, lasting, nasty scars -- which the biggest boars often end up covered in by their old age.

It is often helpful to keep in mind that these fights are part of their life. It is how brown bears are. Big injuries can look really nasty, but they are bears, and they are built to survive these things. Cub deaths are always deeply sad to us humans, especially when they happen on camera or at the hands of a well-loved boar, but they are also normal and expected -- only roughly half of cubs at Katmai survive, and you must be ready to confront this fact if you want to watch the bear cams.

In Conclusion

I'll add to this post as I think of more stuff, other things to link to, etc. Oh, and welcome to the bear cam community, we're very happy to have you join us!

[massachusetts-official]

(Map of Massachusetts Counties)

Wtf is wrong with Norfolk county? it pisses me off. Stick together bro. Power of friendship and shit.

(That little sliver of Suffolk County that's separate gets a pass bc that's obviously Norfolk county fucking it all up for them)

Does anyone know how it ended up that way? I am legit curious now and decided to crowdsource the answer before I just look it up

[galerymod]

Let’s Buy California from Trump – Denmark’s Next Big Adventure

‘Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘Denmark needs more sun, palm trees and roller skates’? Well, we have a unique opportunity to make this dream come true.’

»Måke Califørnia Great Ægain«

Be an investor in democracy, with a level playing field for all, health insurance, labour law, a 30-hour week, and Lego land, the new amusement park in the middle of California.

Let America hope for a little more freedom, equality and fraternity in California, where it all begins.

mod

[penna-nomen]

One of my favorite parts of Rogue Protocol in the Murderbot Diaries series is in chapter 6, because it feels like such a relatable and genius move by author Martha Wells.

At this point in the story, Murderbot has a bunch of information about what's going on. There are some bad guys. There are some bad things that happened. But why? What's their goal? What are they going to do next?

And that's the exact thing that happens to me when I write a long fic. Even though I outline, I do enjoy letting the story shift and change as it goes. Eventually I reach a point where I have to stop and map out what the villain and other characters are doing, because they've gotten away from me. What do they want? What are they going to do to get what they want? How are we going to stop them?

It feels like the author took those questions and threw them at Murderbot to see what it would come up with. Murderbot created a decision tree and put it into the feed to crowdsource with the other characters. So we get to see the inner workings of the story plot as the characters figure it out.

I love that so much!

[digitalnewberry]

Allow us to introduce ourselves...

We're the digital initiatives team at the Newberry Library and our job passion job (that we really like) is to bring the digital collections of the Newberry to YOU, dear reader. On this blog we'll be sharing interesting collection items, educational resources, and crowdsourcing projects. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an ask on here or email us at dis [at] newberry [dot] org. We're also going to keep a running list of our favorite resources on this post so that you can come back here and check them out at any time.

Contribute to collection access & research

Newberry Transcribe: help preserve the past by transcribing handwritten letters & diaries

Postcard Tag: tag & transcribe postcards to help researchers study 20th-century visual culture

Explore our curated collections

Postcard Sender: send vintage postcards to your friends for a holiday or just for fun

Coloring Books: download and color in your own version of these vintage postcards

Humanities resources (for classrooms & lifelong learners)

Digital Collections for the Classroom: primary sources selected by educators, with essays and discussion questions for use in the humanities classroom

Midwest Time Machine: travel to the past via first-hand accounts from letters, diaries, and rare books in the Newberry's collections

Seeing Race Before Race: A Closer Look: explore how manuscripts, printed books, visual art, and maps show race-making at work around the world before 1800

Map resources (for people who love maps)

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries: explore how county borders in the United States changed over the course of centuries

Mapping Movement: read about "maps of movement" from hundreds of years of history

And of course, you can always peruse the hundreds of thousands of digitized items at collections.newberry.org

p.s. our cover image is from this very cool map

[alicesadventuresinffxiv]

Quick Thoughts on Occult Crescent Story

I was awake at patch launch and spent most of yesterday exploring the whole map, grinding silver pieces for the riding map, and as far as I can tell, completing the area story as far as it currently exists.

So, after getting some sleep, here’s my thoughts on it! Major spoilers for both Occult Crescent and for Eureka and Bozja which I compare it to.

.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how I feel about Occult Crescent. 

On the one hand, both Eureka and Bozja suffered a lot from biting off way more than they could chew with the story hooks. They promised really interesting stuff like (Eureka) rescuing Krile’s family and community and (Bozja) a whole revolution effort with tons of characters… but then they couldn’t match story to gameplay and devolved into “find/place magic macguffin here” quests before running out of steam and ending pretty anticlimactically.

OC is much more modest in scope (which is probably good!), and motivates the “go explore to find a place” aspect far more naturally - you’re here to explore, after all! So it feels like the FFXIV team finally learned to write a story that suits this type of content. I didn't even mind the lack of directions to find inter-quest objectives, since I found most just filling out the map and my FC members helped to crowdsource the rest in a heady patch day rush!

On the other hand… after spending the past few months with Bozja’s colorful cast, I actually really miss that aspect? What new characters there are in OC are pretty bare-bones so far. Ketenramm and Ofangeim are competent explorers, that’s nice.  Archive’s introduction is fun, but his amnesia is pretty stock and no points for guessing he’s either the mysterious Architect himself or has something to do with him. Iris has yet to do… anything, really. 

But none of them even leave the exploration base. And so there is just a big fat nothing going on story or character-wise during the exploration. No duels, nothing besides big monsters to fight as far as the eye can see. I haven’t done it yet, but Forked Tower:Blood is implied to be purely for challenge and even less related to the story than Baldesion Arsenal.

(The callback to Red Choctober with another evil Critical Engagement involving chocobos was very funny, though.)

Meanwhile, at this point in Bozja, you had a whole crew that helped you out in skirmishes, multiple villains with big personalities, and Misija had basically gone through a whole character arc with her betrayal!

The field notes for the OC ruins are… fine, I guess? But even they don’t say much about the civilizations. I was super excited for more Skalla lore when I found the western caves, but the note there doesn’t even say anything besides “yup, sure seems to be Skalla ruins.” Aww.

As first impressions go, I think OC story is much less likely to turn into a hot mess the way Eureka and Bozja's did, but it also isn’t nearly as ambitious or interesting in what it’s trying to do. 

At least the zones sure are very pretty and fun to hang out in! And I’m a big fan of the random overworld treasure chests and their seemingly absurd loot drop list. Music and emotes and Jet Black dye, oh my!

[iguanodont]

I was just looking at the all the planet and map info for birg world before but I have a bit of trouble understanding that stuff so I wanted to ask directly how long a day and night is on birg world?

Also sorry if I didn't see it before but is there a proper name/s for their planet? And does the human team have a name for it themselves?

So that’s a bit of a tricky question, because the length of day vs night varies tremendously depending on where you are and what time of year it is. But for general reference the length of a full rotation on this planet is about 15 hours.

Here’s a chart depicting seasonal hours of sunshine for birgworld (courtesy of @cmaidaartworkblog), which I annotated with the approximate number of daylight hours for a few corresponding color zones. The Y-axis represents latitude (how far north or south you are), and the X-axis covers a one-year cycle beginning at the winter solstice at far left. Warmer colors correspond to longer days, with white meaning a full 15 hours of sunshine, and black to a full day of darkness. This is why seasons are so harsh on birgworld. Hopefully this clears things up.

The Twowi call their world Sõwhũtwii, meaning something akin to “the Lower World”.

As to what humanity designates birgworld… I’m still undecided. I’m almost tempted to crowdsource a title in the spirit of how many real exoplanets get their name.

_____________

If you wanna support my work and hear from me more frequently, join me on Patreon

Or just toss me a Kofi

[sinsinewave]

so i had a project idea, inspired by DeArrow and my annoyances with e621's search syntax

as many of you probably know, e621's tagging is kinda.. transphobic (refer to the TWYS Policy), to put it very mildly

and on top of that, i find the search syntax inadequate at best (give me my blooming boolean operations!) --

so my first thought when thinking about all that was, well, why not run my own bloody image board; i tend to just make my own damn software if i dislike something anyways

but like you can see how that's a horrible idea, it'd need tebibytes of storage, and moderating what is essentially a furry porn site sounds like a sisyphean nightmare

additionally, e621 has the critical mass problem of for example youtube; people won't switch because it's where all the artwork is, a new site will have next to nothing for a long time --

which leads me to the actual idea, inspired by DeArrow, which is a browser extension that un-clickbaitifies youtube titles and thumbnails

what if instead of running the whole image board, i ran a crowdsourced alternate search and tagging backend?

that'd only need maybe gibibytes of storage which costs next to nothing, and even moderation can in some part be crowdsourced with a vote system, since actual content moderation is handled by e621 already, and the actual artwork is drawn from an existing big platform so building critical userbase mass is much simpler

and all the backend would need to do is run a database with a search system that maps artwork IDs to sets of tags, which the frontend injects in place of e621's own search interface and tag listing; that's light enough that even a like 5-10€ VPS might handle that

alternatively, it could have a dedicated frontend, doesn't matter really --

as for the tagging, there's even a very trivial solution to the transphobia problem

like 97.3% of searches are for appearance rather than canon gender, so just use trait-based tagging (yes i was inspired by Rust lmao)

instead of tagging a character 'female' because they have tits and you can't see what's between their legs, just tag them 'has_breasts', that's most likely what someone is actually looking for anyways

and if gender tags are to be a thing at all, base those on canon gender, or don't include them if that's not known --

anyway guess it's coding time

might make my trainspotting tool first though, idk

[mariacallous]

Bellingcat Investigator Peter Barth, who grew up in Texas, researched and reported this story in collaboration with the Texas Observer.

William “Bill” Asher Richardson Jr. pulled into the driveway of his upscale Corpus Christi home late on a Sunday night at the end of summer. The wealthy Texas oilman was unloading his Winnebago RV as his wife and stepson walked inside. Their housekeeper, watching through the front window, saw them first: two men, armed with sawed-off shotguns and wearing jumpsuits, running toward Richardson from the shadows.

Without a word, they fired four shells of No. 4 buckshot, sending 45 pellets into Richardson’s head, neck, chest, and arms. The shooters were gone as quickly as they arrived, fleeing in a getaway car. Richardson’s wife tried to call for help, but the phone line had been cut. Her son ran to fetch a neighbouring doctor. It was too late. Richardson, 40, died sprawled on his driveway.

Richardson’s murder on Aug. 1, 1971, remains unsolved.

The case is one of an overwhelming number of unsolved homicides in the United States. The Murder Accountability Project (MAP) counts almost 346,000 cold cases of homicide between 1965 and 2023—likely an undercount since many homicides from the earlier decades are excluded and not all police departments report to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, on which MAP is based.

Clearance rates for US homicides—generally defined as the percentage of cases closed via arrest or the death of a suspect, or ruled to be justifiable—have been declining for years.

Meanwhile, online crowdsourcing efforts have sprung up to tackle cold cases including Uncovered, with almost 50,000 unsolved murder and missing persons cases, and Solve the Case, a nonprofit founded by Aaron Benzick, a detective with the Plano Police Department. “You highlight these cases, and people come forward,” Benzick told Bellingcat. “Even if that doesn’t happen, just organising these cases helps law enforcement.” 

[thelostmetallurgist]

Dwemeris Rosetta Stone...

Dwemeris Rosetta Stone 2.0

A comprehensive framework for deciphering, learning, and playing with the Dwemer (Deep Folk) tongue—runic, spoken, numeric, and mystical.

I. Alphabet & Glyphs

Rune ID Direct English Phoneme Approx. IPA Numeric Value ⟨R1⟩ A /a/ [a] 1 ⟨R2⟩ B /b/ [b] 2 ⟨R3⟩ D /d/ [d] 3 ⟨R4⟩ E /ɛ/ [ɛ] 5 ⟨R5⟩ F /f/ [f] 6 … … … … … ⟨R26⟩ Z /z/ [z] 26 ⟨G0⟩ Zero glyph – – 0 ⟨G★⟩ Capital/Start – – –

Notes:

Runes are carved in sharp, angular strokes echoing gear teeth and vent grooves.

⟨G★⟩ placed at sentence start; ⟨G0⟩ marks numeric zero.

II. Systems of Interpretation

System I: Direct Substitution One-to-one mapping of each Dwemer rune (⟨R#⟩) to a Latin letter (A–Z), ignoring phonetic nuance.

System II: Romanized Phonemes Use English digraphs (/kh/, /th/, /zh/) to approximate distinct Dwemer sounds:

⟨R10⟩ → “kh”

⟨R12⟩ → “th”

⟨R19⟩ → “zh”

System III: IPA‑Precise Assign each rune an IPA symbol for scholarly transcription:

⟨R10⟩ → [x]

⟨R12⟩ → [θ]

⟨R19⟩ → [ʒ]

III. Grammar & Syntax Rules

Morphology: Polysynthetic. Single words can encode subject, object, instrument, and purpose.

Word Order: Typically SOV, but subordinate phrases nest within word‑vehicles.

Plurals & Cases: Indicated by suffix chains (-zûn for plural, -thak for dative).

Verbal Roots: Embedded in initial morpheme; tense/aspect follow as affixes.

Example Structure: duum‑zûn‑kharthak‑eft (dwemer-PL-TO/FOR-help) → “they build for the benefit.”

IV. Core Vocabulary

Dwemer Word System II Gloss duum duum “Dwemer” / “deep folk” duumzûn duum‑zun plural “Dwemer” nchuand‑zel nchuand‑zel “Radiant City” (Markarth) eftar‑ eftar‑ verb root “to promise/swear” fahlzûn fahlzun “great ones” (honorific) khaz khaz “metal” / “iron” zar‑tûk zar‑tuk “secret passage”

New Formed Words (structure follows polysyllabic compounding):

khaz‑duum‑tir: “metal‑deep‑gate” → subterranean vault

eft‑fahl‑khar: “help‑great‑forge” → master smith

V. Numerical System

Base-10. Digits 1–9 use ⟨R1⟩–⟨R9⟩; 0 = ⟨G0⟩.

Notation: Place-value; numbers read left-to-right.

Symbol Sequence Value ⟨R3⟩⟨R1⟩ 31 ⟨G0⟩⟨R5⟩ 05 ⟨R1⟩⟨R0⟩⟨R0⟩ 100

Mathematical Usage: Dwemer engineers carve equations alongside gearweights, e.g. “5⟨G0⟩ + 7⟨G0⟩ = 12⟨G0⟩”.

VI. Practical Examples

Divine Metaphysics (Inscription Fragment)

Runic: ⟨G★⟩ R4‑R1‑R5‑R3‑R7 …

Sys I: E A F D G …

Sys II: /ɛ a f d g/ …

Gloss: “Eternal forge awakens…”

Translation: “When the eternal forge awakens, the world trembles.”

Egg of Time (Mural Glyph)

Runic phrase: ⟨R10⟩‑⟨R4⟩‑⟨R3⟩‑⟨R15⟩

Sys II: kh‑e‑d‑s

IPA: [x ɛ d s]

Meaning Hypothesis: “Cycle” or “renewal.”

Nchuand‑Zel (City Name)

Runic: ⟨R14⟩‑⟨R3⟩‑⟨R21⟩‑⟨R1⟩‑⟨R4⟩‑⟨R14⟩ …

Translation: “Radiant City under the mountain.”

VII. Supplementary Materials

Pronunciation Guide (IPA): Full chart listing all 28 runes with IPA values.

Cultural Context: Dwemer believed sound was material—tonal resonances could animate automatons. Language mirrored their architectural philosophy: precise, durable, efficient.

VIII. Interactive & Collaborative Tools

Digital Rosetta App Mock‑Up:

Rune → drag‑drop to Latin; click to hear IPA playback.

Number pad showing glyphs.

Translation pane with System toggles (I/II/III).

Community Portal Concept:

Live forum threads for new inscription photos.

Crowdsourced lexical suggestions.

Versioning history of hypotheses and peer reviews.

This Rosetta Stone 2.0 is a living document—update with each new cavern find, artifact, and scholarly breakthrough!

[rikaklassen]

There's a Google Maps crowdsourcing mutual aid networks, mask blocs, air filtration donation organizations, air purifier lending libraries and other resource groups. There are over 250 groups and continuously being updated. Please contact them to submit a pin.

Here is the URL for ease of memory recalls: covidactionmap.org

For updates you can follow COVID Action Map here:

Twitter

Instagram

Apologies for excessive tagging, but wanted to make sure the post is easily discoverable by anyone on Tumblr.

[daylane]

how could I go about helping expand the geographic diversity present in your hydrant scans?

If you sincerely wanna contribute you could make a list of cool hydrants in your area (like on Google Maps or something) then email it to me! I travel as much as I can so when I'm in your city I'll try to go out of my way to scan them. I would say scan them and email me the models, but tracking them down is what makes it fun for me. I might start some similar project that's more crowdsourced, but I'm not sure what the subject would be yet.