One of the common complaints I hear is that young volunteers or students can’t read cursive. While it’s true that many students are not taught cursive as part of their school curriculum, that isn't an insurmountable barrier to participating in a transcription project. The medieval and early modern transcription projects on FromThePage are written in scripts that no one uses … [Read more...] about What to Do When Your Transcribers Can’t Read Cursive
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How to Teach with Primary Sources using FromThePage
Last month, Ben and Sara Brumfield hosted a webinar on teaching with primary sources using FromThePage. The presentation, linked below in a video and embedded as slides, presents a walkthrough of how scholars can use FromThePage in the classroom. You can sign up for future webinars here. Watch the recording of the presentation below: Read through Ben and … [Read more...] about How to Teach with Primary Sources using FromThePage
Top Tips from a Crowdsourcerer
We've worked with Meredith McDonough at the Alabama Department of Archives and History since 2018; you may have heard us talking about her very successful WWI Service Cards project -- 111,000 cards indexed in 2 1/2 months. We recently interviewed Meredith for our blog, and her advice is so great that I wanted to share it with you. On prioritizing projects: All the … [Read more...] about Top Tips from a Crowdsourcerer
Public Crowdsourcing or Private Collaboration?
Crowdsourcing connotes a big, public project that anyone can work on, but what you may not know is that about a third of the activity we see on FromThePage happens within private projects -- ones where you have to be invited to transcribe. Since these are invisible, I thought I’d highlight how some institutions are using these projects. When COVID hit, many institutions … [Read more...] about Public Crowdsourcing or Private Collaboration?
Data Visualization Using FromThePage Data
Megan Firestone, the head of special collections at the Smith Library Center at Southwestern University, shared this map based on the diary of Zenas Matthews, transcribed by a volunteer. Each location on the map shows a page from Matthews' diary that was written in the area. This data visualization was created using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Jessi Bennett from the Library of … [Read more...] about Data Visualization Using FromThePage Data