Crowdsourcing is traditionally thought of as image tagging or text transcription, but we're seeing a lot of fascinating new projects using either volunteers, researchers or staff collaborations to index material, transcribe ledgers for data analysis, create alt-text for images, describe items in collections, create or revise metadata, correct OCR, or translate material. Join us for a show and tell of recent projects by a variety of institutions using crowdsourcing and collaborative editing to enhance their collections.
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this class, students will be able to:
Describe the breadth of tasks appropriate for crowdsourcing
Explain reference cases that deepen understanding of crowdsourcing possibilities
Brainstorm project ideas with speakers and other participants
Instructors
Ben Brumfield is the founder of FromThePage. In 2005, he began developing one of the first web-based manuscript transcription systems. Released as the open-source tool FromThePage, it has since been used by libraries, museums, and universities to transcribe literary drafts, military diaries, herpetology field notes, and punk rock fanzines. He has written and presented on crowdsourced manuscript transcription for over a decade. He received a B.A. in Computer Science and Linguistics from Rice University. Since its creation in 2005, the community on FromThePage has transcribed more than 1,000,000 pages from universities, museums, and archives. Today, FromThePage works with institutions from all over the globe. Harvard, Stanford, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the state archives of Alabama, North Carolina, and Maryland are just a few institutions that have used our software to engage the public and enhance their collections.
Sara Brumfield is a software engineer and entrepreneur. She co-founded FromThePage, a crowdsourced transcription platform that allows institutions to share documents for transcription. Prior to founding FromThePage, she spent 17 years as a software engineer with IBM, inventing or co-inventing eight patents. She has a BA in Computer Science and the Study of Women and Gender from Rice University.
