‘Making such bargain’:Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription

In recent years, important research on crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector has been published, dealing with topics such as the quantity of contributions made by volunteers, the motivations of those who participate in such projects, the design and establishment of crowdsourcing initiatives, and their public engagement value. This article addresses a gap in the literature, and seeks to answer two key questions in relation to crowdsourced transcription: (1) whether volunteers’ contributions are of a high enough standard for creating a publicly accessible database, and for use in scholarly research; and (2) if crowdsourced transcription makes economic sense, and if the investment in launching and running such a project can ever pay off. In doing so, this article takes the award-winning crowdsourced transcription initiative, Transcribe Bentham, which began in 2010, as its case study. It examines a large data set, namely, 4,364 checked and approved transcripts submitted by volunteers between 1 October 2012 and 27 June 2014. These data include metrics such as the time taken to check and approve each transcript, and the number of alterations made to the transcript by Transcribe Bentham staff. These data are then used to evaluate the long-term cost-effectiveness of the initiative, and its potential impact upon the ongoing production of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham at UCL. Finally, the article proposes more general points about successfully planning humanities crowdsourcing projects, and provides a framework in which both the quality of their outputs and the efficiencies of their cost structures can be evaluated

Merry work: libraries and citizen science

This article highlights important new opportunities for libraries by analysing the roles they could potentially play in citizen science projects. Citizen science is one of the eight pillars of open science identified by the Open Science Policy Platform, an EC Working Group. The authors of the article suggest that roles for libraries wishing to support or engage in citizen science could include contributing to specific skills development; building and maintaining collections of protocols, data forms and educational materials; contributing to making data FAIR; supporting new communication roles; participating in recruitment and helping volunteers to participate in projects; participating in marketing activities; building further advocacy and developing or implementing a toolkit for citizen science projects. Several of these roles are illustrated by contributing authors in case studies from their institutions, where citizen science has already been embraced: University College London, the University of Barcelona, the University of Southern Denmark and Qatar National Library. This article thus presents a snapshot of what libraries have so far achieved in this sphere and the challenges and opportunities which remain

Decision Support to Crowdsourcing for Annotation and Transcription of Ancient Documents: The RECITAL Workshop

In the 18th century in Paris, only two public theatres could officially perform comedies: the Com{\'e}die-Fran{\c c}aise, and the Com{\'e}die-Italienne. The latter was much less well known. By studying a century of accounting registers, we aim to learn more about its successful plays, its actors, musicians, set designers, and all the small trades necessary for its operation, its administration, logistics and finances. To this end, we employ a mass of untapped and unpublished resources, the 27,544 pages of 63 daily registers available at the Biblioth{\`e}que Nationale de France (BnF). And we take a decidedly fresh look at emerging forms of creation and changes in the entertainmenteconomy. We developed the crowdsourcing platform RECITAL to collect and index the data from theregisters, following an emerging trend in Digital Humanities. RECITAL is built upon the ScribeAPI framework and it offers a fully-fledged web application to classify the pages, annotate with marks and tags, transcribe the indexed marks and even to verify the previous transcripts. We also describe a multi-level data model and to develop a series of monitoring anddecision tools to support crowdsourced data management up to their definitive form

Merry work: libraries and citizen science

This article highlights important new opportunities for libraries by analysing the roles they could potentially play in citizen science projects. Citizen science is one of the eight pillars of open science identified by the Open Science Policy Platform, an EC Working Group. The authors of the article suggest that roles for libraries wishing to support or engage in citizen science could include contributing to specific skills development; building and maintaining collections of protocols, data forms and educational materials; contributing to making data FAIR; supporting new communication roles; participating in recruitment and helping volunteers to participate in projects; participating in marketing activities; building further advocacy and developing or implementing a toolkit for citizen science projects. Several of these roles are illustrated by contributing authors in case studies from their institutions, where citizen science has already been embraced: University College London, the University of Barcelona, the University of Southern Denmark and Qatar National Library. This article thus presents a snapshot of what libraries have so far achieved in this sphere and the challenges and opportunities which remain

Developing a tool for fair and reproducible use of paid crowdsourcing in the digital humanities

Peer reviewe

An introduction to the National Folklore Collection and Meitheal Dúchas.ie

In this paper, a brief description is given of the National Folklore Collection and in particular of the current project to digitize its contents and make them available at Dúchas.ie. Meitheal Dúchas.ie is described as well as some of its benefits

Digital Humanities Techniques for Asylum Studies in the Archive

This project explores the utilization of digital humanities techniques and tools for the purposes of transcription, data analysis, visualization and presentation of archival data pertaining to asylums in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2017, the Community Histories Workshop’s Asylum in the Archive initiative has been digitizing and transcribing records relating to the admission and the assessment of people in the Dorothea Dix asylum from 1856 through 1922. My project builds off this work by developing machine learning models to increase transcription efficiency for future records as they become available, and working with the dataset to analyze, visualize and present the data to tell the history of the asylum and psychiatry. The result demonstrates the value of the work already done, leaves examples and models for future scholarship utilizing this dataset and contributes to broader understanding of the emergence of psychiatry and the asylum in the South.Master of Science in Information Scienc