Crowdsourcing transcription of historical manuscripts: Citizen science as a force of revealing historical evidence from Croatian Glagolitic manuscripts

Abstract

This paper is a report on the project Civil Science in the Field of Glagolitics: from crowdsourcing to knowledge and it describes its first phase. The project is being conducted by the scientific Centre for Research in Glagolitism of the University of Zadar, Croatia, from 2021 to 2022. The researchers come from the Centre, as well as from the Department of Information Sciences of the University of Zadar and State Archive in Zadar, Croatia. The main objective of the project is to examine the possibilities and benefits of citizen participation in the scholarly projects in humanities, particularly the projects whose object of research are manuscripts written in historical script that present a valuable source for local history. The term historical script refers to a script that is not used nowadays as an official script in any country or community but was in use a particular period of history on a certain territory. The corpus for the pilot study conducted within this project consists of manuscripts and their fragments written in cursive form of the Croatian Glagolitic script. Glagolitic script is the oldest known Slavic script, introduced in the 9th century and being used in Croatia up until the 19th century, simultaneously with Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The citizen participation is researched on the example of crowdsourcing transcription of manuscripts written in cursive form of the Croatian Glagolitic script. In the first phase of the project, the pilot study was conducted. The aim of the pilot study presented in this paper is to create a solid basis for involving the public in scientific projects within the disciplines of humanities whose object of research are documents written in historical scripts, namely within the field of the Croatian Glagolitics.