In the majority of cases, professional translations are the only way to gain a full understanding of text. Yet, Ancient Lives, a crowdsourcing translation project by Zooniverse, hopes to make it possible for regular citizens to help with the translating of important Greek documents.

By visiting the website http://ancientlives.org/, casual netizens are asked to study images of papyrus fragments to help decipher Greek letters. Each helper will be provided with a suite of tools to mark, measure, and identify the text that they find.

With enough contributions, the Ancient Lives project hopes that it will be able to gain an accurate understanding of the lives of people who lived in Egypt between the ages of Alexander the Great, and Jesus.

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