I recently saw a presentation by Dick Kasperowski and Olof Karsvall about research they’d done on The Detective Section, a crowdsourcing project at the Swedish National Archives. Their findings contradicted some of the conventional wisdom that volunteers introduce bias into results when they bring their own subject-matter expertise to citizen science tasks, and that made me … [Read more...] about Connection Makes Quality
Measuring Success in Crowdsourcing Projects
On July 28, Sara and I hosted the first FromThePage User Group Meeting in Washington DC. It was a fun event--to me it felt more like a party than a meeting, since I got to spend most of my time introducing my colleagues to each other. (That said, cocktails were replaced with breakfast tacos, which we thought a little more appropriate for 8:30 AM.) I spent some days … [Read more...] about Measuring Success in Crowdsourcing Projects
Transcriptions, Screen Readers, and ChatGPT
Usually, when we transcribe documents, we type what we see, retaining irregular spelling and punctuation. But does this practice–a scholarly standard–serve everyone? I wondered how screen readers deal with verbatim transcriptions, so I ran an experiment. I used Microsoft Narrator, the screen reader built into Windows, to read passages aloud from a 19th-century … [Read more...] about Transcriptions, Screen Readers, and ChatGPT
What Machines Can’t Replace: Old Fashioned Human Efforts
Let’s talk about transcription in scholarly editions – those collections of “papers” by or about historical or literary figures, published for readers and researchers. There are basically three ways edition projects transcribe papers. The first is the old-school way with staff members doing it manually. The second is a group effort, which can be done through crowdsourcing … [Read more...] about What Machines Can’t Replace: Old Fashioned Human Efforts
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 to look for patterns. Over the previous … [Read more...] about How Do Holidays Affect Crowdsourcing?