A round-up of a few pieces of digital goodness to cheer up a damp and dark start to October:
What looks like a bumper new issue of the Journal of the Society of Archivists (shouldn’t it be getting a new name?) is published today. It has an oral history theme, but actually it was the two articles that don’t fit the theme which caught my eye for this blog. Firstly, Viv Cothey’s final report on the Digital Curation project, GAip and SCAT, at Gloucestershire Archives, with which I had a minor involvement as part of the steering group for the Sociey of Archivists’-funded part of the work. The demonstration software developed by the project is now available for download via the project website. Secondly, Candida Fenton’s dissertation research on the Use of Controlled Vocabulary and Thesauri in UK Online Finding Aids will be of interest to my colleages in the UKAD network. The issue also carries a review, by Alan Bell, of Philip Bantin’s book Understanding Data and Information Systems for Recordkeeping, which I’ve also found a helpful way in to some of the more technical electronic records issues. If you do not have access via the authentication delights of Shibboleth, no doubt the paper copies will be plopping through ARA members’ letterboxes shortly.
Last night, by way of supporting the UCL home team (read: total failure to achieve self-imposed writing targets), I had my first go at transcribing a page of Jeremy Bentham’s scrawled notes on Transcribe Bentham. I found it surprisingly difficult, even on the ‘easy’ pages! Admittedly, my paleographical skills are probably a bit rusty, and Bentham’s handwriting and neatness leave a little to be desired – he seems to have been a man in a hurry – but what I found most tricky was not being able to glance at the page as a whole and get the gist of the sentence ahead at the same time as attempting to decipher particular words. In particular, not being able to search down the whole page looking for similar letter shapes. The navigation tools do allow you to pan and scroll, and zoom in and out, but when you’ve got the editing page up on the screen as well as the document, you’re a bit squished for space. Perhaps it would be easier if I had a larger monitor. Anyway, it struck me that this type of transcription task is definitely a challenge, for people who want to get their teeth into something, not the type of thing you might dip in and out of in a spare moment (like indicommons on iPhone and iPad, for instance).
I’m interested in reward and recognition systems at the moment, and how crowdsourcing projects seek to motivate participants to contribute. Actually, it’s surprising how many projects seem not to think about this at all – the build it and wait for them to come attitude. Quite often, it seems, the result is that ‘they’ don’t come, so it’s interesting to see Transcribe Bentham experiment with a number of tricks for monitoring progress and encouraging people to keep on transcribing. So, there’s the Benthamometer for checking on overall progress, you can set up a watchlist to keep an eye on pages you’ve contributed to, individual registered contributors can set up a user profile to state their credentials, chat to fellow transcribers on the discussion forum, and there’s a points system, depending on how active you are on the site, and a leader board of top transcribers. The leader board seems to be fueling a bit of healthy transatlantic competition right at the moment, but given the ‘expert’ wanting-to-crack-a-puzzle nature of the task here, I wonder whether the more social / community-building facilities might prove more effective over the longer term than the quantitative approaches. One to watch.
Finally, anyone with the techie skills to mashup data ought to be welcoming The National Archives’ work on designing the Open Government Licence (OGL) for public sector information in the U.K. I haven’t (got the technical skills) but I’m welcoming it anyway in case anyone who has hasn’t yet seen the publicity about it, and because I am keen to be associated with angels.