Militieregisters.nl is a new transcription project organized by the City Archive Amsterdam that plans to use crowdsourcing to index militia registers from several Dutch archives. It's quite ambitious, and there are a number of innovative features about the project I'd like to address. However, I haven't seen any English-language coverage of the project so I'll try to … [Read more...] about Militieregisters.nl and Velehanden.nl
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Errata
Two important errata in previous posts are worth highlighting: Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription Commenters on my most recent post, "Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription" have pointed out that the Wikisource rule prohibiting the addition of unpublished works--thereby almost entirely prohibiting manuscript transcription projects--is specific to the language domains. … [Read more...] about Errata
Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription
Of the crowdsourcing projects that have real users doing manuscript transcription, one of the largest is an offshoot of Wikisource. ProofreadPage was an extension to MediaWiki created around 2006 on the French-language Wikisource as a Wikisource/Internet Archive replacement for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. They were taking DjVu files from the InternetArchive … [Read more...] about Wikisource for Manuscript Transcription
Interview with Hugh Cayless
One of the neatest things to happen in the world of transcription technology this year was the award of an NEH ODH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to "Image to XML", a project exploring image-based transcription at the line and word level. According to a press release from UNC, this will fund development of "a product that will allow librarians to digitally trace handwriting … [Read more...] about Interview with Hugh Cayless
Review: USGS North American Bird Phenology Program
Who knew you could track climate change through crowdsourced transcription? The smart folks at the U. S. Geological Survey, that's who! The USGS North American Bird Phenology program encouraged volunteers to submit bird sightings across North America from the 1880s through the 1970s. These cards are now being transcribed into a database for analysis of migratory pattern … [Read more...] about Review: USGS North American Bird Phenology Program