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
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Transcription for Pedagogy
There's a Classics professor, Adam Rabinowitz, at the University of Texas at Austin, who uses FromThePage as a teaching tool in an undergraduate course. The class — "Tales of the Trojan War: from Bronze Age to Silver Screen"— works with a collection of letters from Alexander Watkins Terrell, Texas judge and legislator, an early regent at the University of Texas, and Grover … [Read more...] about Transcription for Pedagogy
An Interview With Julia Gearhart of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology
Julia Gearhart, Director of the Visual Resources Collection of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, kindly spoke with Sara Brumfield about their experience using FromThePage. First, tell us about your documents. Our first project involved correcting OCR from typed excavation reports from the 1930s, of excavations of Antioch-on-the-Orontes. We now … [Read more...] about An Interview With Julia Gearhart of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology
Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?
Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor. My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that. I talked about meaningful volunteer work and how -- since our … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?
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