Last night, the Zooniverse folks announced their latest venture: Ancient Lives, which invites the public to help analyze the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The transcription tool meets the high standards we now expect from the team who designed Old Weather, but the project immediately stirred some controversy because of its terms of use: Sean is referring to this section of the … [Read more...] about Can a Closed Crowdsourcing Project Succeed?
Crowdsourcing and Variant Digital Editions
Writing at the JISC Digitization Blog, Alastair Dunning warns of "problems with crowdsourcing having the ability to create multiple editions." For example, the much-lauded Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) are now beginning to appear on many different digital platforms. ProQuest currently hold a licence that allows users to … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing and Variant Digital Editions
My Goals for FromThePage
A couple of recent interactions have made me realize that I've never publicly articulated my goals in developing FromThePage. Like anyone else managing a multi-year project, my objectives have shifted over time. However, there are three main themes of my work developing web-based software for transcribing handwritten documents: Transcribing and publishing family diaries. … [Read more...] about My Goals for FromThePage
2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription
2010 was the year that collaborative manuscript transcription finally caught on. Back when I started work on FromThePage in 2005, I got the same response from most people I told about the project: "Why don't you just use OCR software?" To say that the challenges of digitizing handwritten material were poorly understood might be inaccurate—after all the TEI standard included … [Read more...] about 2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription
Progress Report: GitHub, Archive.org Integration, and General Availability
2010 saw big changes in FromThePage. The Balboa Park Online Collaborative started using FromThePage to transcribe the field notes of herpetologist Laurence Klauber. Perian Sully, Rich Cherry, and all the other folks there have been fantastic to work with: full of enthusiasm and new ideas for the system while patient with the bugs that we've discovered. This is the first … [Read more...] about Progress Report: GitHub, Archive.org Integration, and General Availability