Crowdsourcing can be an exciting way to improve metadata and to experiment with making metadata more comprehensive. We all describe materials differently and uniquely based on our own interests, perspectives, and life experiences. How do you take crowdsourced metadata and make it useful? In the book, Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web, […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
Marriage certificate transcription helps COVID care (!)
Liz Coelho, Director of Special Projects at the Maryland State Archives, recently sent this to her transcribers: Many thanks to you for your help with our FromThePage marriage certificate projects in 2021. Your work has made it possible for the Archives to quickly assist many people with their requests for marriage certificates. On my first […]
What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?
I’ve been studying ways we might reduce errors--including my own!--in crowdsourced transcription projects. Part of that work has been analyzing a dataset of raw volunteer contributions to the Missouri State Archives death certificate indexing project, but another part has been reading what textual scholars have written about errors left by ancient and medieval scribes. Eugène […]
An Interview with Molly Kerr of History Revealed
Molly Kerr, the Founding Director of History Revealed, Inc., a non-profit, historical research organization, kindly spoke with Sara Brumfield about their experience using FromThePage. First, tell us about your documents. The Shopping Stories project focuses on store ledgers from the 18th century. Our first phase transcribed the John Glassford & Company store ledgers from Alexandria […]
Transcription for Pedagogy
There's a Classics professor, Adam Rabinowitz, at the University of Texas at Austin, who uses FromThePage as a teaching tool in an undergraduate course. The class — "Tales of the Trojan War: from Bronze Age to Silver Screen"— works with a collection of letters from Alexander Watkins Terrell, Texas judge and legislator, an early regent […]
An Interview With Julia Gearhart of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology
Julia Gearhart, Director of the Visual Resources Collection of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, kindly spoke with Sara Brumfield about their experience using FromThePage. First, tell us about your documents. Our first project involved correcting OCR from typed excavation reports from the 1930s, of excavations of Antioch-on-the-Orontes. We now have a […]