Scoping Scalable Sustainable DH Infrastructure for Online Crowdsourcing

FAIN: HAA-296330-24

Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum (Chicago, IL 60605-2403)
Samantha Blickhan (Project Director: June 2023 to present)

An evaluative study of the underlying code, functionality, and user interface of Zooniverse, a free crowdsourcing platform for transcribing humanities documents.

This project will solicit feedback from users of key digital humanities resources that make up part of the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform, as well as supporting a code audit, in preparation for plans to scale. These resources—user-facing tools for collaborative text transcription, and a browser-based application that supports viewing and editing of transcription project results—support teams using Zooniverse to crowdsource the transcription of historic documents, and help ensure that the labor provided by volunteer transcribers leads to high-quality, useable results. We are requesting a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to support an evaluative study of current Zooniverse infrastructure that supports the humanities. The information we learn from the proposed efforts will allow us to create a development and sustainability plan in service of adapting existing tools to support a wider user base, and building new features based on the needs of our current community.