We’ve been helping the University of Leeds with their Dialect and Heritage Project, which was recently featured on The One Show.

The National Lottery Heritage-funded initiative aims to present a snapshot of the language used in England today, by understanding which words and phrases are still in use, and how they spread around the UK. You can help by taking the survey – powered by our content collection tool Iszy – where you’ll be asked things like “What do you call a room in a house for storing food?” and “Does the word SCONE rhyme with GONE or BONE for you?”

Our friends at Ammba built the survey which also asks you to name things from photos, or complete sentences like “Even after a day at the playground, the children were still full of…” I found it really fascinating and entertaining to see some of the multiple choice options and realise how we speak so differently around the country!

TAKE THE SURVEY

Their project was featured on The One Show earlier this month, and we were able to scale up the server architecture a few hours prior to the TV segment so that it could handle the load caused by all the extra visits.

The University are using Iszy’s built in Geographical features so that it can autofill UK place names as the person taking the survey starts to type, meaning more consistent data can be collected. They’re also using the CSV download tools so that the data can all be processed and analysed. As a piece of bespoke development, we added the ability to upload audio to Iszy so that people can record themselves saying words in their regional accent, via their phone, directly into the survey.

If you need to collect content from your team or audience – be that photos, videos, audio or just text – or want to discuss your hosting requirements if you have a system that can suddenly need to handle surges in traffic, please get in touch. Iszy can help encourage your team to give you repeat content by incentivising and rewarding their submissions – great for when you need newsletter content from a team of volunteers, or need to build a bank of case studies of what your team on-the-ground have been up to.

Iszy also lets you easily display any images you’re sent – once you’ve approved them – as a gallery on your website, with options to let your website visitors “like” or comment on the pictures.