Last modified: Wednesday, 22-Sep-2021 14:08:38 UTC. Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (eeb4 at psu.edu). Powered by firebellies.

Crowdsourcing Transcription: Exercise and Reflection

With this exercise, try to involve yourself for a short while in a crowd-sourcing transcription project, do some transcription or review to help with a project, observe the process and reflect on the experience.

Look for an archive where there is still transcription to do in any one of the following resources:

Transcribe North Carolina: This requires you to create an account and verify you are not a bot.
Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Site: Try the Browse Projects to find unfinished transcriptions, take a look at the African American History archives, or choose any other that looks interesting to you.

Now, begin working on transcription and take notes observing and reflecting on your experience as you go. Take a little time and care, at least an hour, immersed in the transcription process and recording some notes and screen captures.

Important! Look for and read the transcription instructions first for the resource you are working with.
- Transcribe North Carolina: Quick video introduction, + From the Page transcription instructions (PDF)
- Smithsonian: General Instructions for Transcription and Review
Do your best to supply some transcription or correct some existing transcription of a page.
Take screencaptures of a page as you are editing to show some of the challenges of the transcription process that you can share with the class.
Notice when you have to turn to using symbols (pseudomarkup) in order to represent something about the text you are reading.
Think: What questions and issues can you identify with the transcription process? What interesting research leads could you see in the passages you tried to work on? What issues do you think people might have with reviewing and correcting transcriptions?
Comment on your experience with volunteercrowd-sourced transcription and post screen captures of your work on our textEncoding-Hub Crowdsourcing thread for this exercise.