I was approached recently by colleagues who’d received a complaint about ethnic slurs in material they’d transcribed, asking for guidance on what to do. We don’t have a firm answer to this question, so I looked around at projects on FromThePage and among the documentary editing and archives communities to see what they’re doing. In traditional print publications, one must … [Read more...] about From the Founder: Thoughts on Ethnic Slurs & Offensive Language in the Sources We Transcribe
NEH to fund better internationalization and integration in FromThePage
We are thrilled to announce the award of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Advanced Grant to our collaborators at University of Texas Libraries and LLILAS Benson Center This work will fund important enhancements to FromThePage. Multilingual Support While FromThePage supports transcribing text in any Unicode-supported script, the application interface … [Read more...] about NEH to fund better internationalization and integration in FromThePage
The Decade in Crowdsourcing Transcription
Nine years ago, I summed up 2010 as "the year that crowdsourced transcription finally caught on." This seems like a good time to review the big developments in the field over the decade that 2010 launched. What the field looked like in 2010 It's interesting to look back at 2010 to see what's happened to the projects I thought were major developments: FamilySearch … [Read more...] about The Decade in Crowdsourcing Transcription
The Stagville Accounts in DEPCHA: Plantation Financial Records as Linked Data
On March 8, 2018, I presented this talk at a conference at Michigan State called "Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade". The conference was live-streamed, so a video recording of all presentations is available on the MATRIX YouTube channel. My presentation starts at 1:04:55 and is embedded below, followed by slides and text. It's important to … [Read more...] about The Stagville Accounts in DEPCHA: Plantation Financial Records as Linked Data
Crowdsourcing the Alabama World War I Service Records
On August 2, 2018, Meredith McDonough of the Alabama Department of Archives and History and Ben Brumfield of Brumfield Labs presented "Crowdsourcing the Alabama World War I Service Records" at the CONTENTdm User Meeting. Our fellow panelists were Phil Sager and Kristen Newby of the Ohio History Connection, who presented on the crowdsourced transcription system they had built … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing the Alabama World War I Service Records