As part of my PhD research I have been looking at a handful of other transcription projects that use crowdsourcing. Some of our readers might be interested in checking them out so I thought I would put some information about them here.
1. Transcribe Bentham
This is a transcription project over at UCL where volunteers are helping to transcribe the handwritten folios of Jeremy Bentham, who was amongst other things a philosopher and jurist. Their work has been very interesting for me as they also have a crowdsourcing branch as part of a wider project, as we do, but their crowdsourcing is on a much bigger scale than ours, has been going on longer and the publications of analysis and reflection are very interesting. Definitely worth a look. And if you’re that way inclined why not download their new game and have a go at running a prison according to Bentham’s design? I would, but my thesis supervisor is forever cracking the whip.
2. The International Greek New Testament Project – The Gospel According to John
The team behind this are largely based in the same corridor as the Estoria project. They are working towards an edition of the Gospel According to John by transcribing some of the major witnesses. They prefer to use the term ‘volunteer’ rather than ‘crowdsourcer’, but for the most part it is the same thing as what we do, as volunteers sign up, follow a training course and then are let loose on some transcriptions. Their manuscripts are in biblical Greek, so this is not for the faint of heart, but again, it is well worth a look to see what other transcription projects are doing.
3. Revealing Co-operation and Conflict
This project has used a MOOC which first took place in the summer of 2014 to train a largely non-academically active audience to read and transcribe medieval Spanish manuscripts. In just three weeks more than 600 folios were transcribed, and the information has helped the project to build up information about the town of Plasencia in the 15th century. I took this MOOC and it helped me to learn a lot not just about palaeography and transcribing, but about crowdsourcing in general, and it was also where I met Nick who has become the Estoria project’s longest-term and most prolific crowdsourcer. I definitely recommend visiting virtual Plasencia.
Academics from all three of these projects have been extremely helpful in providing me with information about their projects, so if any of them read this I would like to say a big thank you.