The other idea I would love to talk about is the idea of distributed document transcription as I explain it in my blog post: Archival Transcriptions: for the public, by the public. While I do love what reCaptcha does at the word level and Footnote.com does with locations, names and dates – I still think there is a place for a centralized web-based system where digitized documents can be uploaded and then transcribed & verified by volunteers. I think this would be especially powerful for smaller archives.
I would love to hash out this idea with others as well as learn what other projects like this might already exist.
Tags: crowdsourcing, transcription
The entire reason I’m going to THATCamp is to get feedback on my software for collaborative manuscript transcription. Adam and I are planning to do a joint session at which we demo our alphas. If you can’t make that, perhaps we could get together outside that?
I look forward to seeing your demo!
Are you aware of the LDS church site for transcription of genealogical records? http://www.familysearchindexing.org
[...] Crowdsourcing transcriptions [...]
[...] ‘Crowdsourcing’ on the schedule was actually aimed at discussing the intersection of crowdsourced transcription and collaborative annotation. The group was small – just six of us and Ben Brumfield got us going [...]
[...] http://thatcamp.org/2008/05/crowdsourcing-transcriptions/ [...]