Building capable communities for crowdsourced transcription

FAIN: HT-272556-20

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)
Evan Roberts (Project Director: March 2020 to present)
Samantha Blickhan (Co Project Director: May 2020 to present)
Benjamin Wiggins (Co Project Director: May 2020 to August 2023)

An institute to help cultural organizations plan, develop, and launch crowdsourcing projects focused on engaging communities with their collections.

Converting printed texts into digital formats is now straightforward, enabling humanities scholars to mine the world's cultural heritage. But many crucial sources exist only in manuscript form and are difficult to integrate into the future of the digital humanities. If we can convert handwriting into machine-readable text we can connect the past and present of the humanities. People can often decipher unfamiliar handwriting, and improvements in software and public engagement have made crowdsourced transcription effective. But getting it all right—design, engagement, and accuracy—remains tricky. The University of Minnesota, Adler Planetarium, and Zooniverse, as leaders in developing crowdsourcing transcription platforms, will convene an Institute developing a cohort of leaders who develop crowdsourced transcription projects. The Institute will take a cohort through the process together, led by a team with successful experience in crowdsourced transcription and teaching.

Associated Products

Poets & Lovers (Web Resource)
Title: Poets & Lovers
Author: Peter M Logan
Abstract: Poets & Lovers aims to transcribe the diaries and related papers of two major women poets of the fin de siècle, who published as "Michael Field." Much of this material has only been accessible through archives in the UK until now. This project will make their material freely available to all readers in standards-compliant web and downloadable formats.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/pmlogan/poets-and-lovers
Primary URL Description: Citizen science transcription site

Maria Edgeworth Letters (Web Resource)
Title: Maria Edgeworth Letters
Author: Hilary Havens
Abstract: the Maria Edgeworth Letters project aims to create a standard digital edition of letters written by Maria Edgeworth that is as complete as possible, accessible to all, and fully searchable. Additionally, the project will provide a corpus of plain-text transcriptions of all of the letters for data mining, text analysis, and visualization. In providing this open access digital resource, we will be able to locate Edgeworth in her historical and social context and demonstrate her importance for studies of gender, race, religion, education, and science of and beyond the period.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mariaedgeworthletters/maria-edgeworth-letters/about/research

Corresponding with Quakers (Web Resource)
Title: Corresponding with Quakers
Author: Rachael S King
Abstract: Corresponding with Quakers is the transcription site for the Ballitore Project. This project investigates and digitizes an archive of Quaker documents to reveal new perspectives on early feminist and abolitionist thought, while also confronting systemic racism in archival studies and the digital humanities through a collaboration between a large public research university, a public teaching-intensive university, and an HBCU: the University of California, Santa Barbara; California State University, Northridge; and Howard University. The project focuses on the Ballitore Collection, an archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quaker correspondence and journals held at UCSB’s Special Research Collections. This unique, virtually unknown collection sheds light on the intersection of gender, race, class, and religion in the period, a turbulent moment in which British and American abolitionists were pushing to end the slave trade. The primary author is Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826), an Anglo-Irish poet and essayist and central figure in Quaker circles. Quakers were key players in abolition despite their small numbers and secondary political status, and they also exhibited proto-feminist tendencies with their emphasis on female preaching. But the collection also reflects many structural hierarchies, as its contents were assembled by a middle-class white woman and the Black voices in the collection are filtered through a white framework—from that of Leadbeater, who first compiled the documents, to that of its twentieth-century archivization and dissemination. The collection opens onto a host of identities from the eighteenth-century British Empire and early United States to today. To find new ways of surfacing these competing perspectives, Hidden Archives applies computational techniques to a manuscript archival collection. We are using two primary techniques: topic modeling and network analysis. Topic modeling is a method that breaks documents and collections into lists
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/rachaelsking/corresponding-with-quakers

People's Contest Digital Archive (Web Resource)
Title: People's Contest Digital Archive
Author: Kevin M. Clair
Abstract: This community transcription project seeks to engage the public with the People's Contest Digital Archive through transcription of the diaries and personal accounts collected by the Archive from the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State and from archives and museums across Pennsylvania. By transcribing these diaries, volunteers will assist scholars who study the lived experience of Pennsylvanians during the mid-19th century, or who wish to conduct text analysis of these personal accounts. They will also assist the University Libraries in establishing workflows for building and maintaining libraries of text from our digital collections as objects of research and study. Finally, they will themselves learn more about the history of the people and places of Pennsylvania during the Civil War era.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/kmc35/peoples-contest-digital-archive/about/research

PRINT (Web Resource)
Title: PRINT
Author: Rosalind J. Beiler
Author: Amy Larner Giroux
Abstract: Welcome to People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel – Migration in the Early Modern World. How did news travel in the seventeenth century? What role did religion play in people’s mobility? Help us transcribe Quaker letters to understand how their authors’ social and religious networks shaped their movements. PRINT is a collaborative digital humanities project that traces the communication networks of early modern European religious minorities (Anabaptists, Quakers and Pietists) and the ways they shaped the dynamic patterns of migration in the Atlantic world. Housed at the University of Central Florida, PRINT is creating a digital repository of letters and tools for visualizing the complex connections the correspondence reveals. We seek to understand the links that arose in response to religious persecution and missionary work and the way those connections influenced migration flows. Our goal is to work with archives and citizen transcribers to provide access to documents not readily available and to create digital tools to foster new textual and network analysis.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/printmigrationnetwork/print
Primary URL Description: A link to the Zooniverse project site

Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain (Web Resource)
Title: Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain
Author: Prof. Dr. Roger L. Martinez-Davila.
Abstract: Deciphering Secrets is a collaborative citizen science project focused on revealing the inter-religious relations of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and religious converts during the 12th through 16th centuries in late medieval and early modern Spain. This project, directed to the public and scholars alike, offers access to: 1. The Deciphering Secrets Medieval Spanish Manuscript and Transcription Collection; 2. Spanish paleography and historical resources that include e-publication, video instruction, and practicums; 3. Peer-reviewed research and publications and other findings; and 4. Citizen science Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and our Zooniverse efforts.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/profdrrogerlouismartinez-davila/deciphering-secrets-unlocking-the-manuscripts-of-medieval-spain
Primary URL Description: A link to the Zooniverse project site

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