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From Archives to Data: Crowdsourcing Special Collections

Home / Project Briefing Pages / CNI Fall 2016 Project Briefings / From Archives to Data: Crowdsourcing Special Collections

November 29, 2016

Amy Azzarito
Assistant Director, Online Strategy, Library
University of California, Davis

Peter Leonard
Director, DHLab
Yale University

Lindsay King
Associate Director, Arts Library
Yale University

Crowdsourcing: What’s Next (Azzarito)

In the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of crowdsource-based digital humanities projects. Not only have crowdsourced projects increased institutional engagement, but they have also proven to be an effective way to chip away at institutional transcription backlog. However, too often the crowdsourced project ends up being the final digital treatment of these artifacts.

In July 2016, the Library at the University of California Davis launched a crowdsource wine label transcription project as the first step in creating and then leveraging ontologies, data and additional digital assets to create a larger digital platform through which wine-lovers, researchers and historians around the world can understand the stories of wine. The transcription tool allowed the Library to foster engagement and interest in collection, and also provided the foundation on which to build a larger discovery platform. This presentation will discuss how to successfully design a crowdsourcing project that enables the institution to pivot to a larger platform, ways to foster community engagement, and how to organize and use the data generated in a crowdsourcing project.

Crowdsourcing Theater History Metadata from the Archives (Leonard, King)

This presentation will introduce Ensemble@Yale, a crowdsourced transcription project that aims to produce a database of information about theater history at Yale. Ensemble@Yale showcases thousands of pages digitized from archival holdings: nine decades of programs that chronicle the origins of Yale’s Department of Drama in 1925, its growth into the influential School of Drama in 1955, and the emergence of its associated professional theater company Yale Repertory Theatre from 1966 through the present day. Through further development of Scribe, a New York Public Library Labs/Zooniverse project funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities (DH) Implementation Phase DH Grant, Ensemble@Yale harnesses the energy and knowledge of alumni, current Yale College students and the general public to create human interpretations of the wealth of relationships latent in theatrical programs, such as actor/character, playwright/play. In addition to creating a searchable database of answers to reference questions such as “How many Shakespeare plays have been staged at the School of Drama?”, “Which plays did Meryl Streep appear in while she was a student?” and “Which actors have played Hamlet at Yale?”, Ensemble@Yale is ready to play its part alongside other performance archives in producing a digital network of theater history.

https://labelthis.lib.ucdavis.edu/
http://web.library.yale.edu/dhlab/ensemble

Presentation (Leonard)

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Filed Under: CNI Fall 2016 Project Briefings, Digital Humanities, Project Briefing Pages, Social Media
Tagged With: cni2016fall, Project Briefings & Plenary Sessions

Last updated:  Sunday, November 30th, 2025

 

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