Conclusion: Development as a Response to Need
Both resources described here were created as a direct response to demonstrated need. Although they represent major strides in our organization to support project teams working in GLAM and Humanities fields, they are only a response to a subset of the needs of our community. Each works well for documents that include a lot of (mostly) unstructured text, such as letters, diaries, or recipes. We chose this type of document because, based on our experience, this type of text was 1) most frequently included in projects; and 2) the most difficult to aggregate. However, we're aware that neither approach works well for structured data such as forms or tables.
This process is representative of the strategic goals for Zooniverse Humanities projects. We know there isn't a one-size-fits all approach to all text transcription projects, and we are choosing to focus our development efforts based on the current needs of our community. This allows us to work closely with community partners and iterate based on feedback from project builders and volunteers alike.
As we finish the active development periods for each of the resources described here and shift into long-term maintenance mode, we will turn our development focus to other areas which need improvement such as: creating tools for transcribing structured data, providing additional aggregation support for other data types, and creating tools for volunteer review of machine-generated transcriptions.
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