I wanted to write this month about ChatGPT, and how archives are about as anti-ChatGPT as you can get. Archives can provide learning experiences that ChatGPT can’t fake. First, a simplification that’s useful in thinking about what ChatGPT (and its ilk) can – and can’t – do. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a “large language […]
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Recent Posts from FromThePage
Trust in the Truth
Happy February. I thought I’d write about how transcription in the classroom could counter the challenges ChapGPT introduces, but then I ran across this quote from James Baldwin and decided to ruminate on transcribing the difficult parts of history: People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. Perhaps you're faced with the […]
Using Crowdsourced Indexes in Preservica
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 […]
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 […]