Transcribe Bentham is a crowd-sourced transcription project where users transcribe manuscripts and are incentivized by a point system and progress ladder.
In a partnership with Gale/Cengage Learning, 18thConnect will now be crowd-sourcing text correction, and the incentive for participation is much more practical: access to ECCO materials (a resource not every c18 scholar has access to) and the option of submitting their work as a scholarly edition.
Despite the best OCR technologies, c18 typefaces still pose a problem in the process of digitization. To solve the problem, a correction tool has been created which will allow users to correct erroneously digitized texts, in return for access to materials and the option to “submit the revised text as a scholarly edition.”
Exciting news not only for c18 scholars, but an interesting experiment in crowd-sourcing the digital humanities. Unlike Transcribe Bentham, 18thConnect seems to be targeting an academic audience as key participants.
Read the rest of the press release at 18thConnect.