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Editors’ Choice: ‘Making such bargain’: Transcribe Bentham and the quality and cost-effectiveness of crowdsourced transcription

We (Tim Causer, Kris Grint, Anna-Maria Sichani, and me!) have recently published an article in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities on the economics of crowdsourcing, reporting on the Transcribe Bentham project, which is formally published here:

Alack, due to our own economic situation, its behind a paywall there. Its also embargoed for two years in our institutional repository (!). But I’ve just been alerted to the fact that the license of this journal allows the author to put the “post-print on the authors personal website immediately”. Others publishing in DSH may also not be aware of this clause in the license!

So here it is, for free download, for you to grab and enjoy in PDF.

I’ll stick the abstract here. It will help people find it!

In recent years, important research on crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector has been published, dealing with topics such as the quantity of contributions made by volunteers, the motivations of those who participate in such projects, the design and establishment of crowdsourcing initiatives, and their public engagement value. This article addresses a gap in the literature, and seeks to answer two key questions in relation to crowdsourced transcription: (1) whether volunteers’ contributions are of a high enough standard for creating a publicly accessible database, and for use in scholarly research; and (2) if crowdsourced transcription makes economic sense, and if the investment in launching and running such a project can ever pay off. In doing so, this article takes the award-winning crowdsourced transcription initiative, Transcribe Bentham, which began in 2010, as its case study. It examines a large data set, namely, 4,364 checked and approved transcripts submitted by volunteers between 1 October 2012 and 27 June 2014. These data include metrics such as the time taken to check and approve each transcript, and the number of alterations made to the transcript by Transcribe Bentham staff. These data are then used to evaluate the long-term cost-effectiveness of the initiative, and its potential impact upon the ongoing production of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham at UCL. Finally, the article proposes more general points about successfully planning humanities crowdsourcing projects, and provides a framework in which both the quality of their outputs and the efficiencies of their cost structures can be evaluated.

 

Read the full piece here.

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Laura Crossley based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: bbuck, cwilkin.