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
Florence Bürgy on Selecting Material and Designing Projects
This is the first of a short series of posts highlighting the Masters Thesis by Florence Bürgy, Pratiques participatives et patrimoine numérisé : le cas des manuscrits. Réflexion en vue d’un projet de transcription collaborative en Ville de Genève. Bürgy analyzed the crowdsourcing needs of several cultural heritage institutions in Geneva, Switzerland, interviewing experts, … [Read more...] about Florence Bürgy on Selecting Material and Designing Projects
Textual Corruption is How Our Brains Work
I had a long conversation with my neighbor about theory of mind yesterday, and it's got me thinking about present-day corruption in textual transmission. Cognitive science is not my thing, but he introduced me to Predictive Coding - the idea that our brains are constantly making predictions about the world based on insufficient data, then (sometimes) correcting course when … [Read more...] about Textual Corruption is How Our Brains Work
Classifying the Mistakes We Make When We Transcribe
When we transcribe handwritten text, we make mistakes. We misread words with difficult letters; we accidentally modernize a word with archaic spelling; we skip a line. Everyone does it, and even though we humans don’t make as many mistakes as computers do reading handwriting, that might be small comfort for people who are trying to do their best at a difficult task. Is it … [Read more...] about Classifying the Mistakes We Make When We Transcribe