Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

Translator's knowledge in the cloud: the new translation technologies

After machine translation, the translation technology market is witnessing a new revolution. Relevant changes are taking place under emerging phenomena of the Web such as crowdsourcing, i.e., the exploitation of a community/group of people to perform tasks normally performed by employees and cloud computing technologies, which enable ubiquitous access to digital content and online multilingual translation tools. In particular, the combination of crowdsourcing and cloud models of automatic/assisted translation is taking place on a large scale, combined with the availability of tools shared in translation environments. This contribution will analyze the impact of the new collaborative translation technologies on the translation process and the working practices of translators, highlighting the possible implications in the field of translation teaching

Foreword

My final remark is that, as with any new development, it is important on one side to leave space to the free rise of new ideas and methods inside the collaborative paradigm, but is also important to start organising its future. There must be a bold vision and an international group able to push for it (with both researchers and policy makers involved) and to organise some grand challenge that, via a distribution of efforts and exploiting the sharing trend, involves the collaboration of a consistent portion of our community. Could we envision a large "Language Library" as the beginning of a big Genome project for languages, where the community collectively deposits/creates increasingly rich and multi-layered LRs, enabling a deeper understanding of the complex relations between different annotation layers/language phenomena

Translation crowdsourcing: creating a multilingual corpus of online educational content

The present work describes a multilingual corpus of online content in the educational domain, i.e. Massive Open Online Course material, ranging from course forum text to subtitles of online video lectures, that has been developed via large-scale crowdsourcing. The English source text is manually translated into 11 European and BRIC languages using the CrowdFlower platform. During the process several challenges arose which mainly involved the in-domain text genre, the large text volume, the idiosyncrasies of each target language, the limitations of the crowdsourcing platform, as well as the quality assurance and workflow issues of the crowdsourcing process. The corpus constitutes a product of the EU-funded TraMOOC project and is utilised in the project in order to train, tune and test machine translation engines

Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities: An Action Research on the Shengxuanhuai Manuscript Transcription

In recent years, there has been an emerging trend in the GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to leverage crowdsourcing to improve the collection, organization, and evaluation of valuable resources. Although a se-ries of notable crowdsourcing projects in the digital humanities have been launched worldwide, there are few academic studies on investigating the im-plementation and evaluation of such cases. To fill up the research gap, this study aims at conducting a field exploration on the real case called the Shengxuanhuai Manuscript Transcription Initiative (Transcribe Sheng for short). In this poster, action research will be carried out to explore the vari-ous stages of Transcribe Sheng project. Our attempts may shed light on the design and evaluation principles of the crowdsourcing in the digital humani-ties