Comments on: Session Proposal: Crowdsourcing

By: Ben Brumfield

Ben Brumfield — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:27:06 +0000

Today I interviewed the main volunteer for Southwestern University’s Zenas Matthews Mexican War diary project. In that case, the passionate volunteer arrived before the project was even announced — the head of Special Collections asked a patron who’d written about related material to take a quick peek and tell her what he thought. Within sixteen days he transcribed the entire diary and moved on to adding notes on the people and places mentioned. This has made our big public launch a bit awkward since the first pass has already been done, but I think that’s a wonderful problem to have.

He told me “it keeps calling me back.”

By: Melody

Melody — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:32:16 +0000

UIowa’s transcription project on Civil War diaries has been really inspiring to watch. I was told one transcriber went through 400 pages on her own. This demonstrates a kind of personal engagement with the content that librarians/archivists/content providers dream of. And isn’t that the more idealistic goal: connecting users to sources that enrich their life experiences?

So the question I have is: how to go from the base need (recruiting volunteers to provide free labor) to the ideal (engaging members of the public to enrich their life experiences)?

By: Ben Brumfield

Ben Brumfield — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:20:59 +0000

I don’t see why not. My perspective may be limited based on my experience with crowdsourced manuscript transcription, but I hope not to restrict the session to just that niche.

By: Katrina

Katrina — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:30:11 +0000

Could this session also include crowdsourced peer review? I have been intrigued with the experiments (such as with the Shakespeare journal that tried this).

I am interested too in projects like the Trove newspaper digitisation at NLA, which does rely on crowdsourced corrections of text. (Isn’t CAPTCHA a crowdsourcing goal: even though many participants would not realise this).