Itinera Nova in the World(s) of Crowdsourcing and TEI

Ben Brumfield

International Colloquium Itinera Nova

Crowdsourced Transcription

Offline projects from the 1990s

Van Papier Naar Digitaal (NL)

FreeBMD/FreeREG/FreeCEN (GB)

Demogen (BE)

Arkivalieronline (DK)

Western Michigan Genealogy Society (US)

Crowdsourced Transcription

Online tools developed from 2005

Diverse projects released from 2006

2006 FamilySearch Indexing

2008 FromThePage

2008 Wikisource (+ ProofreadPage)

2009 North American Bird Phenology Program

Tension

Volunteer transcribers vs. Professional editors

Easy tools vs. Powerful tools

Easy Tools, Hard Mark-up

Amateurs + Mark-up = ???

So get rid of the mark-up, right?

Power vs Usability

• Power can enable users.

• Lack of power frustrates users.

• For transcription, mark-up is power.

Power vs Usability

• A little story about scrambled eggs...

TEI

Ultimate in mark-up

Standard since 1990

Ubiquitous in scholarly editing

Usually hand-edited XML in offline tools“TEI? That's just for data entry.”

TEI

Strengths– Powerful data model

– Tools for presentation and analysis– Active community

Genetic Edition Module– Represents changes to texts– Still in development

TEI

But how was that encoded?

TEI

Amateurs + TEI = ????

Rarely attempted– 29 projects in crowdsourced transcription tool

directory– Only 7 claim to “support TEI”

TEI + Amateurs

• Tag Buttons– T-PEN/CCL

– TEI Toolbar (TB)

• Tag Menus– VdU– Papyrological Editor

Buttons: Transcribe Bentham

Menus: MOM-CA

Button Limitations

• Users outgrow buttons– “I believe one or two transcribers now add

tags manually rather than use the toolbar, which says something about the improvement in their IT skills.” –Tim Causer (TB)

• Users ignore buttons– “One editor for exampled prefered to put || for

<lb> as he was used from the preparation of a printed edition.” –Georg Vogeler (VdU)

Button Limitations

“...there were something like 67 necessary buttons, and it was maddening to fish around for the desired button. And the research assistants, who had been encoding in oXygen, just typed in angle brackets and memorized tags, instead of using the buttons. .” – Abigail Firey (CCL)

A New Way

A New Way

A New Way

A New Way

For data entry, consider alternatives to TEI– Existing print notations (e.g. Leiden+)

– Robust data entry tools

Use TEI for data models and presentation– Papyrological Editor

Opportunities to combine crowdsourcing tools with TEI– Skylark project at UMD MITH

• Zooniverse transcription components

• Genetic edition TEI module

Questions

Ben Brumfield

@benwbrum

benwbrum@gmail.com

FromThePage.comSlides and transcript at

http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/