Harnessing crowdsourcing for scholarly and GLAM purposes

Abstract

AbstractFull text search is vital to research of many kinds, but automatically creating transcriptions of most handwritten materials and ornate print is not yet technologically achievable. Even companies that have invested heavily in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and search optimization, such as Alphabet (Google's parent company), have yet to make (or make widely available) technology for parsing handwritten or ornate text. Crowdsourcing conducted by scholars and cultural heritage practitioners offers an opportunity for us to engage with a diverse public who are interested in transcribing historical, literary, and other documents, in order to advance human knowledge. Crowdsourcing is a great vehicle for engaging students of all walks of life, with primary sources. Virtual volunteers all around the world are eager to learn and contribute to the vast project of making the world's textual records more widely accessible, not only for search, but for those, such as blind and partially sighted people, who use screen readers.