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 […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
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 […]
Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?
Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor. My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that. I talked […]
Using FromThePage to Create Descriptive Metadata at Ohio University Libraries
Ohio University Libraries has an internal staff project that uses FromThePage to generate transcriptions and descriptive metadata for a collection of dance posters. This project is a hybrid project, in that transcriptions are generated along with text from the posters captured through standardized metadata fields. These fields allow the posters to be more accessible and […]
The Transcription Quality Balancing Act
We're often asked about the quality of crowdsourced transcription projects by people skeptical that amateurs can edit historic documents. Of course we're confident that amateurs can do high-quality work--especially in active collaboration with professionals--or else we wouldn't be doing this. But many questions remain. What is "quality"? While writing the first draft of the quality […]