Scribe: Toward a general framework for community transcription
NYPL Labs and Zooniverse built Scribe, a highly configurable, open source framework for setting up community transcription projects around handwritten or OCR-resistant texts. Scribe suits digital humanities, library, and citizen science projects seeking to extract highly structured, normalizable data from a set of digitized materials (e.g. historical manuscripts, account ledgers, catalog cards, or maritime logbooks). Scribe prototypes a certain way of thinking about community transcription. The app attempts to break complex identification & annotation flows into small, manageable tasks. By reducing the unit of work, we hope to reduce the cognitive barrier to entry as well as maximize the distribution of effort across multiple people. The talk will identify the community transcription design patterns that informed the unique architecture of Scribe. March will be a great time to also discuss the successes and challenges of Emigrant City ( http://emigrantcity.nypl.org ), a project built with Scribe that launched in Nov 2015. http://scribeproject.github.io http://emigrantcity.nypl.org
