What can you do with transcripts once your project is done? The Texas Digital Archive transcribed the handwritten index to a 3rd court of appeals and turned it into a look up table by Appellant and Appellee, making their digitized case records much more accessible. The Texas Commission on Libraries and Archives transcribed a handwritten […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
How Do Holidays Affect Crowdsourcing?
How do holidays affect crowdsourcing in cultural heritage? Many people are away from work, spending time with family and friends, but is that true of the retirees that make up the bulk of our volunteers? We thought about this last month, just after Thanksgiving in the USA. A regional holiday seemed like a good opportunity […]
What is Meaningful Work?
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 […]
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 […]