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?
Mistakes We Make: Crowdsourcing and Quality Control
Last month, John Dougan and I presented this talk at the Best Practices Exchange conference at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. This blog post contains our slides and talk notes, with John's presentation followed by mine. [John Dougan] Over the last three decades the Missouri State Archives has maintained a robust distance volunteer indexing program that we now … [Read more...] about Mistakes We Make: Crowdsourcing and Quality Control
Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Last month, I read "Imbalanced volunteer engagement in cultural heritage crowdsourcing: a task-related exploration based on causal inference", by Zhang, Zhang, Zhao and Zhu. The authors analyzed the Trove crowdsourcing platform at the National Library of Australia to look for patterns in contributions by volunteers correcting the OCR text of old newspaper articles. While I … [Read more...] about Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Structured Data API
We're pleased to announce the new Structured Data API for FromThePage. This IIIF-based API enables programmatic harvesting of crowdsourced contributions for field-based and spreadsheet-based transcription projects as well as user-created item-level metadata. Used in conjunction with the contributions API, developers should be able to poll a FromThePage server for the most … [Read more...] about Structured Data API