Ask HN: How to contribute to an academic field without Masters/PhD?

[snowisgone]

How does one make meaningful contributions to an academic field without being part of the academy (eg a graduate program, etc)? I'm a professional software engineer, but I have interests in history, anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, etc. How can I make meaningful contributions in any of these? Are there examples of this?

[gostsamo]

Contribute to academic os software, find academic who needs tech support, do the grunt work in preparing a dataset.

[snowisgone]

What about fields such as history or anthropology?

[gostsamo]

History: OCR of documents; image recognition for symbols; automatic translation;

Anthropology: language research; voice recognition of interviews; face recognition;

Highly depends on the topic and the project.

[ordu]

Conferences I think would be a great starting place. They allow you to find what is interesting to you and people with the same interests.

[ahazred8ta]

Work with a co-author.