Happy February. I thought I’d write about how transcription in the classroom could counter the challenges ChapGPT introduces, but then I ran across this quote from James Baldwin and decided to ruminate on transcribing the difficult parts of history: People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. Perhaps you're faced with the stark history of injustice -- … [Read more...] about Trust in the Truth
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How Do Holidays Affect Crowdsourcing?
How do holidays affect crowdsourcing in cultural heritage? Many people are away from work, spending time with family and friends, but is that true of the retirees that make up the bulk of our volunteers? We thought about this last month, just after Thanksgiving in the USA. A regional holiday seemed like a good opportunity to look for patterns. Over the previous … [Read more...] about How Do Holidays Affect Crowdsourcing?
What is Meaningful Work?
As FromThePage matures, we’re getting a little more introspective. How do we keep the values we brought to this work as two scrappy software developers? If we add employees, how can we ensure they hold the same values we do? What are those values, anyway? (If you know – from observation – what we stand for, we’d love to hear it). We work on FromThePage, instead of our … [Read more...] about What is Meaningful Work?
Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
Last month, I read "Imbalanced volunteer engagement in cultural heritage crowdsourcing: a task-related exploration based on causal inference", by Zhang, Zhang, Zhao and Zhu. The authors analyzed the Trove crowdsourcing platform at the National Library of Australia to look for patterns in contributions by volunteers correcting the OCR text of old newspaper articles. While I … [Read more...] about Imbalanced Volunteer Engagement
What to Do When Your Transcribers Can’t Read Cursive
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