New developments in crowdsourced text transcription
Samantha Blickhan
Zooniverse & the Adler Planetarium, Chicago IL
Overview
This interactive poster will present two new resources for text transcription projects on the Zooniverse.org crowdsourcing platform.
The first resource, the Transcription Task, is a newly-developed tool available on the Zooniverse Project Builder that allows transcribers to see and interact with transcription data provided by others.
The second resource, ALICE: the Aggregate Line Inspector and Collaborative Editor, is a browser-based app designed for project creators to use to review and edit the results of Zooniverse text transcription projects.
History of the project(s)
Since its creation in 2009, the majority of projects on the Zooniverse platform have been dedicated towards scientific research, particularly in the fields of astrophysics and ecology. Though humanities projects have existed on the platform since as early as 2011, a concerted effort began in 2016 when the Zooniverse was awarded a National Leadership Grant from the IMLS. Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing aimed to conduct research and build new tools to help the Zooniverse better support galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) in their efforts to incorporate crowdsourcing into their institutions.
The main goals of the Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing project were to 1) determine what method(s) for text transcription produce the highest-quality data; 2) compare independent vs. collaborate methods of text transcription; and 2) encourage knowledge exchange between GLAMs and the Zooniverse to facilitate research needs.
The Transcription Task was developed as part of the Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing research goals. While this project was ongoing, however, we realized that, even with the new tools being developed as part of the IMLS-funded effort, there was still a gap in the data roundtripping process. Teams that wanted to use the Zooniverse platform for text transcription often did not have the data science skills required to aggregate the data output from their projects. We designed ALICE as a response to the needs of these teams, and in 2018 we were awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop this resource.