Although the field of transcription tools has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years, most academic publications on the topic focus on a single project and the lessons that project can teach. While those provide invaluable advice on how to run crowdsourcing projects, they do not lend much help to memory professionals trying to decide which tools to … [Read more...] about Jens Brokfeld's Thesis on Crowdsourced Transcription
Webwise Reprise on Crowdsourcing
Back in June, the folks at IMLS and Heritage Preservation ran a webinar exploring the issues and tools discussed at the IMLS Webwise Crowdsourcing panel "Sharing Public History Work: Crowdsourcing Data and Sources." After a introduction by Kevin Cherry and Kristen Laise, Sharon Leon, who chaired the live panel, presented a wonderful overview of crowdsourcing cultural … [Read more...] about Webwise Reprise on Crowdsourcing
Mosman 1914-1918 on FromThePage
The Mosman community in New South Wales is preparing for the centennial of World War One, and as part of this project they've launched mosman1914-1918.net: "Doing our bit, Mosman 1914–1918". The project describes itself as "an innovative online resource to collect and display information about the wartime experiences of local service people," and includes scan-a-thons, … [Read more...] about Mosman 1914-1918 on FromThePage
Building a Structured Transcription Tool with FreeUKGen
I'm currently working with FreeUKGen--the charity behind the genealogy database FreeBMD--to build a general-purpose, open-source tool for crowdsourced transcription of structured manuscript data into a searchable database. We're basing our system on the Scribe tool developed for the Citizen Science Alliance for What's the Score at the Bodleian, which originated out of their … [Read more...] about Building a Structured Transcription Tool with FreeUKGen
ReportersLab Reviews FromThePage
Tyler Dukes has written a concise introduction to the issues with handwritten material and a lovely review of FromThePage at ReportersLab: Even when physical documents are converted into digital format, subtle inconsistencies in handwriting prove too much for optical character recognition software. The best computer scientists have been able to do is apply various … [Read more...] about ReportersLab Reviews FromThePage