We've been talking about review & quality control in the last couple of newsletters. Today, we're going to talk about one of the simplest ways to do a quick review for quality: scanning spreadsheets of transcribed data.
Our very first field-based transcription project was the World War I Service Cards project at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. When we talked to Meredith, the archivist who ran the project, about how she reviewed transcriptions, she told us that she exported spreadsheets of the transcribed data and scanned the fields looking for anomalies. By putting all the data in the same large spreadsheet -- and sorting it by different fields and transcriber name -- things that didn't look quite right, or patterns of mistakes, would jump out. Simple, yes, but effective.
We've taken that idea of "reviewing via spreadsheet" even further in recent updates to FromThePage. Transcribers will call out their questions and concerns in the notes fields on each page.
In the ideal world other transcribers and project owners would be monitoring and responding to those questions, but we also have a "Notes" export that will export all the notes from a project in a spreadsheet with links back to the page the note was left on. It's an efficient way to review all those notes and respond to them -- either by reassuring the transcriber or by updating the transcription. You can do this multiple times during the life of your project, too.
For spreadsheet transcription projects, the data can be really dense. Instead of one record a page, like the WWI cards, there are many records on a page. When you run a spreadsheet transcription project, we suggest adding an additional column to your data entry simply entitled "notes". That way transcribers can call out issues *on the record* itself, making it easier for you (or other volunteers) to find and update the record. Those notes fields will also export when you export the project data, so you can review it then as well.
Review is a necessary part of any project, but we want it to be as quick and pain free as possible -- Spreadsheets to scan are just one way FromThePage makes crowdsourcing easier.
Read the previous newsletters on reviewing:
How Good Is Good Enough? Reviewing Transcriptions
Make Reviewing Easier