On April 29, 2021, Ben and Sara Brumfield sat down with Jim Ambuske, Ph.D., who leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library, to record an episode of Conversations at the Washington Library. In this podcast, Jim discusses how the Washington Library in Mount Vernon used FromThePage to create work-from-home transcription solutions for their team members. At the … [Read more...] about Conversations at the Washington Library Podcast: Transcribing From The Page with Sara and Ben Brumfield
FromThePage
Can the Crowd Create Metadata?
Crowdsourcing can be an exciting way to improve metadata and to experiment with making metadata more comprehensive. We all describe materials differently and uniquely based on our own interests, perspectives, and life experiences. How do you take crowdsourced metadata and make it useful? In the book, Metadata: Shaping Knowledge from Antiquity to the Semantic Web, … [Read more...] about Can the Crowd Create Metadata?
Marriage certificate transcription helps COVID care (!)
Liz Coelho, Director of Special Projects at the Maryland State Archives, recently sent this to her transcribers: Many thanks to you for your help with our FromThePage marriage certificate projects in 2021. Your work has made it possible for the Archives to quickly assist many people with their requests for marriage certificates. On my first day back in the new year I got a … [Read more...] about Marriage certificate transcription helps COVID care (!)
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?
An Interview with Molly Kerr of History Revealed
Molly Kerr, the Founding Director of History Revealed, Inc., a non-profit, historical research organization, kindly spoke with Sara Brumfield about their experience using FromThePage. First, tell us about your documents. The Shopping Stories project focuses on store ledgers from the 18th century. Our first phase transcribed the John Glassford & Company store ledgers from … [Read more...] about An Interview with Molly Kerr of History Revealed