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OUR MONTHLY SELECTION OF THE WEB’S MOST REVEALING, USEFUL OR ILLUMINATING NEW SITES.

GlobalXplorer CROWDSOURCING ARCHAEOLOGY TO PROTECT PRECIOUS SITES FROM LOOTING AND POLLUTING

GlobalXplorer’s aim is to harness the power of the crowd to “discover and protect our shared human history”, which translates to locating culturally significant sites and determining if they have fallen victim to looting, with an eye as to prevent further looting in the area. You’re essentially presented with a ‘tile’ — a small square of satellite imagery — and you simply click the ‘Looting’ or ‘No Looting’ buttons (or press your ‘1’ or ‘2’ keys, respectively) based on what you see. The procedure is simple but it can be tricky to know what to look out for, so thankfully there’s a handy tutorial video that gives you some of the more common indicators. You can create an account and earn videogame-esque achievements and unlockables as you chew through more tiles, and every couple of days of an investigation will reveal a new set of incredible articles on the region, supplied by National Geographic. It’s a great incentive to get the internet community to cover as much ground as possible in the battle against looting, and help reclaim some of our history.

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