Adventures in Transcription and Digital Heritage
I found this week’s reading about shared authority through crowdsourcing and audience participation very interesting. I hadn’t realized how much went into designing and coming up with ideas to make activities appealing to audiences in order to encourage their participation with the technology. I had no idea that the “I’m not a robot” tests were actually crowdsourcing of poorly digitized data. I find it so random and funny. As far as I was aware before reading these articles, I had only used one crowdsourcing application consciously.
A few months ago, for another class, we had to transcribe X number of words for the Smithsonian Transcription Center as a way to practice reading old handwriting and secretary hand. Most all of us in the class went way beyond the number of words and pages we were required to do because we got so caught up in the satisfaction of being able to read some of these handwritings. Some words or even just letter combinations took 3-4 communications to make sense of but once I became more familiar with the writers handwriting style, I wanted to see how much I could do, how far I could get before he stumped me again. It was like a challenge with myself, and it was so satisfying in the end to “win” (for lack of a better word to describe the feeling). Eventually I ran out of letters in the handwriting I was familiar with and stopped participating in the transcription.
These articles also reminded me of an application or computer system that I heard about over the summer called Mukurtu CMS that was designed and meant to allow indigenous peoples to “manage and share digital cultural heritage” (http://mukurtu.org/). Though not exactly crowdsourcing and audience participation as the articles described it, I feel like this is another form of targeted group participation. It allows indigenous peoples to have an access platform to share their input and knowledge about their cultural heritage with others. It gives these groups back control of their heritage and culture, of what information is shared and how it is presented. This is especially important when combined with museum settings where many of the Native American collections were obtained before there was much respect for Native cultures, and especially without Native input.
