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
What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?
I’ve been studying ways we might reduce errors--including my own!--in crowdsourced transcription projects. Part of that work has been analyzing a dataset of raw volunteer contributions to the Missouri State Archives death certificate indexing project, but another part has been reading what textual scholars have written about errors left by ancient and medieval scribes. Eugène … [Read more...] about What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?
The Transcription Quality Balancing Act
We're often asked about the quality of crowdsourced transcription projects by people skeptical that amateurs can edit historic documents. Of course we're confident that amateurs can do high-quality work--especially in active collaboration with professionals--or else we wouldn't be doing this. But many questions remain. What is "quality"? While writing the first … [Read more...] about The Transcription Quality Balancing Act