As FromThePage matures, we’re getting a little more introspective. How do we keep the values we brought to this work as two scrappy software developers? If we add employees, how can we ensure they hold the same values we do? What are those values, anyway? (If you know – from observation – what we stand […]
Main Content
Recent Posts from FromThePage
On Improving Error & Quality in Crowdsourced Transcription
Last June, Ben Brumfield of FromThePage and Austin Mast of Florida State University/iDigBio had a meaty discussion of error and quality in crowdsourced transcription. The discussion, which was moderated by Sara Brumfield, started with the dimensions of quality, compared multi-track (i.e. many transcriptions of the same bits) and arbitration to single track (i.e. a one-person […]
Mistakes We Make: Crowdsourcing and Quality Control
Last month, John Dougan and I presented this talk at the Best Practices Exchange conference at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. This blog post contains our slides and talk notes, with John's presentation followed by mine. [John Dougan] Over the last three decades the Missouri State Archives has maintained a robust distance volunteer indexing […]
Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Last month, I read "Imbalanced volunteer engagement in cultural heritage crowdsourcing: a task-related exploration based on causal inference", by Zhang, Zhang, Zhao and Zhu. The authors analyzed the Trove crowdsourcing platform at the National Library of Australia to look for patterns in contributions by volunteers correcting the OCR text of old newspaper articles. While I […]
Your First Crowdsourcing Project
Last September, Ben and Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar on your first crowdsourcing project. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, covers selecting material, finding volunteers, developing transcription conventions, keeping volunteers engaged, and what to do with your transcriptions once you're done. You can sign up for future webinars here. Read through Ben […]
How can my archive crowdsource record indexing?
Last May, Ben and Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar on successful crowdsourced indexing. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, presents a walkthrough of how project staff selected material, recruited volunteers, developed instructions, encouraged engagement, and used volunteer contributions to improve public access. You can sign up for future webinars here. Read […]