Crowdsourcing, Public Engagement, and the Practice of Deciphering Handwritten Text

Benjamin Wiggins, .
Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota
Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse

Historians have long collaborated to transcribe handwritten text into printed or electronic formats. Historically, collaborative transcription was most prominent in three areas: making public the writing of prominent individuals, creating genealogical and demographic data, and creating primary-source teaching materials. In the past decade, advances in web-based technology have made a large-scale collaboration with members of the public feasible: crowdsourcing transcription. With a growing number of platforms and projects available to support this work, producing digital, searchable corpora of historical texts has become inexpensive and reliable. Drawing on our experience leading an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities workshop from 2021-23 we provide an overview of how crowdsourced transcription fits into the scholarly work of historians, and how we approached training historians in these methods via the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform. We emphasize the importance of beginning crowdsourcing projects by thinking primarily about transcription as a form of public engagement with historical sources. Beginning with the public in mind creates the conditions for successful and sustainable crowdsourcing projects that can transcribe a significant volume of handwritten material with high levels of accuracy.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 58. New Historical Data Reconstructions