Liz Coelho, Director of Special Projects at the Maryland State Archives, recently sent this to her transcribers: Many thanks to you for your help with our FromThePage marriage certificate projects in 2021. Your work has made it possible for the Archives to quickly assist many people with their requests for marriage certificates. On my first day back in the new year I got a … [Read more...] about Marriage certificate transcription helps COVID care (!)
crowdsourcing
What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?
I’ve been studying ways we might reduce errors--including my own!--in crowdsourced transcription projects. Part of that work has been analyzing a dataset of raw volunteer contributions to the Missouri State Archives death certificate indexing project, but another part has been reading what textual scholars have written about errors left by ancient and medieval scribes. Eugène … [Read more...] about What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?
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
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