While the transcription world buzzes with news of the release of the 1940 US census and the crowdsourced transcription projects that surround it, I'd like to draw your attention to a blog post published last week on La Tribune des Archives: "Edition collaborative de manuscrits sur Wikisource : 1er retour d'expérience". The post covers the efforts of the archives of the … [Read more...] about French Departmental Archive on Wikisource
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Can a Closed Crowdsourcing Project Succeed?
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?
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
Two New Diary Transcription Projects
The last few weeks have seen the announcement of two new transcription projects. I'm particularly excited about them because--like FromThePage--their manuscripts are diaries and they plan to open the transcription tasks to the public. Dear Diary announces the digitization of University of Iowa's Historic Iowa Children's Diaries: We have a deep love for historic diaries as … [Read more...] about Two New Diary Transcription Projects
NABPP Transcription User Survey Results
The ever-innovative North American Bird Phenology Program has just released the results of their user satisfaction survey. In addition to offering kudos to the NABPP for pleasing its users--who had transcribed 346,786 species observation cards as of November--I'd like to highlight some of the survey results -- after all, this is the first user survey for a transcription tool … [Read more...] about NABPP Transcription User Survey Results