Today we bring you the first of several spotlights on a different sort of Scripto user. Before, we have featured individual transcribers who have devoted time to transcribing War Department documents. Here, though, we feature an institution that has implemented their own verison of the Scripto tool to power their own transcription project. The project is called DIY History, and is brought to us by the University of Iowa Libraries.

We recently sat down with two of the folks responsible for DIY History: Shawn Averkamp, Data Services Librarian; and Jennifer Wolfe, Metadata Librarian, to talk about DIY History, Scripto, and crowdsourcing.

How did you get started using Scripto?

Shawn Averkamp: “Well, it really began with the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project. Within eighteen months, volunteer contributors transcribed something like 15,000 pages. So with the diaries and letters nearly completed, we expanded to include transcription opportunities for other handwritten materials; DIY History was launched in October of 2012.”

And what were your goals going into the project?

SA: “The main goal, as with most crowdsourcing projects, was to make historic artifacts more accessible. We wanted to be able to handle the records better—for example, making them more easily searchable; but also by asking the public to interact with the materials in new ways. Another example: texts can be scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) add full text searchability, you can’t do that other primary source materials like handwritten documents or photographs. To make the documents usable requires time and money—paying people to transcribe or describe each item; and anyway that that doesn’t scale with traditional library workflows. By asking volunteers to do this and attaching their contributions to the artifacts in our digital library, users can search on this added text to more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.

What did you have to do to make Scripto work for you? And were there any technical challenges?

Jennifer Wolfe: “To run its crowdsourcing project, DIY History uses Omeka and Scripto. We are using Omeka as our content management system. We pretty much use Scripto right out of the box, with some minor tweaking. Which we did in-house, by the way. Scripto allows us oversight of all these transcriptions with a modest staff of editors. We really try not to do much editing—most transcriptions remain pretty much as our transcribers finish them.”

Are there challenges you did not anticipate?

SA: “We face some of the same challenges any crowdsourcing project would face—formatting, for example. Many of our transcribers feel it is important to reproduce the actual look of the documents, and that is sometimes hard to do. We would rather they focus on the content and not so much the appearance.”

JW: “Scaling was another consideration. Our project includes many more primary sources than some do, and we needed to be able to deal with materials from several collections. The sheer number of items, hundreds of thousands, means that we needed an efficient workflow.

With more than 30,000 finished transcriptions, DIY History continues to be an example of what crowdsourcing can do. Take a few dedicated volunteers and some tools, and you can empower them in new ways.

Reporter Marc Parry offered the story of the archive’s original reconstruction, its innovative online-first format, and our use of community transcription. The piece includes interviews with Editor-in-Chief Christopher Hamner, archive originator Ted Crackel, and the Scripto project director Sharon Leon.

WordPress + Scripto
• Features
• Installation and Configuration Instructions

Drupal + Scripto
• Features
• Installation and Configuration Instructions

1. Download and install Omeka 1.4 (Scripto is compatible with 1.4+)
2. Download and install MediaWiki (Scripto is compatible with 1.15+)
3. Download and install the Scripto plugin
   1. Download the 0.1 tag
   2. Extract into Omeka’s plugin directory
   3. Rename the resulting directory to “Scripto”
   4. Install and configure the plugin in Omeka
   5. Read the instructions

This is a testing release, which means that you should only install the plugin on testing and development sites. It also means we are actively soliciting feedback. Please consider sharing your testing notes, bug reports, suggestions, and overall impressions with us. Just become a member over at the Scripto Dev Google Group and start a discussion there. We eagerly await your comments.

While working on the plugin it occurred to me that our focus on document images is unnecessarily narrow. Sure, our initial use case was a collection of images, but what’s keeping us from transcribing other file formats? Online collections contain many types of files, including audio and video. I’ve made some minor adjustments to the library that underscore Scripto’s ability to work with heterogeneous file formats. The upcoming Scripto plugin will showcase this ability.

Happy transcribing!

With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities and the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, CHNM is pioneering a new phase in digital documentary editing, by allowing users to transcribe historical documents and contribute them to a digital archive of correspondence, speeches, accounting logs, and other documents from early American history.

Building on the models of other crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia and Flickr Commons, PWD will benefit from the various enthusiastic communities of volunteer transcribers. Volunteers—who may include historians doing scholarly research, students and teachings, genealogists, and other interested members of the general public—will have the opportunity to transcribe any of the over 45,000 documents in the digital archive.  In doing so, they will make that text available to the search engine, improving the ability of users to locate the materials they need.  Additionally, as users select documents to transcribe the editors at the PWD project will gain significant insights into the areas of the collection that are of most interest to the wider user community.

PWD’s work with community transcription is part of a larger project to make crowdsourcing possible for archivists and documentary editors with digital collections, using a slightly customized version of Scripto. Eventually, other projects will be able to plug Scripto into a number of common content management system through the use of some simple connection scripting. Editors interested in adding transcription to their archive can experiment with the tool in its current alpha state. CHNM will use the feedback from this implementation with PWD to improve the Scripto’s functionality.

Please experiment with this version of Scripto by registering for a transcription account today!

A survey of the current landscape in public history, archive, and museum projects suggests that a tide of interest in crowdsourcing is building in the community. Just recently, the participants in the Digital Humanities API Workshop at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities produced an excellent summary of recent work and current needs. The list of projects launched recently is long and includes projects such as:

• Ben Brumfield’s FromThePage
• Transcribing Bentham
• WikiSource
• Rescript
• T-Pen
• Old Weather
• DigitalKoot

This ecosystem of relate projects all draw up on the interest and enthusiasm of members of the general public to advance the work of important intellectual ventures. In a sense, the participants in these projects work to support Clay Shirky’s thesis in Cognitive Surplus (2010) that new media is allowing individuals to redirect their free time away from passive consumption of media to active participation in social and cultural ventures that can be harness in positive ways. Shirky’s work is somewhat utopian, but we at CHNM share his enthusiasm for the possibilities that community-wide collaboration might have for our work in public history.

Our enthusiasm for community participation in public history comes from the mission of the Center, which includes using “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” This impulse to provide open access to historical materials and to build open source tools also includes an interest in welcoming the wider public to join us in our work. In 1998 CHNM founder Roy Rosenzweig entitled his closing thoughts of The Presence of the Past (co-authored with David Thelen) “Everyone a Historian,” in an effort to indicate the very complex interpretations individuals who are not professional historians make of their encounters with history. We wish to encourage this historical work by providing everyone with access to historical materials and opportunities to participate in the work of history.

In addition to these general goals for members of the interested public, we have several specific goals for Scripto and its role in crowdsourcing documentary transcription for documentary editors.

1. For digital documentary projects, Scripto will allow users to provide text that is essential to improving the function of the archive’s search engine and the ability for users to locate the materials they need. As such we are not looking for perfect transcriptions, but rather the progressive improvement that users can provide over time. All of the text contributed by the crowd will provide more data to search, and will allow users to pursue topics and interests that might not be represented in the metadata created by project editors.
2. For documentary projects with the fiscal resources for professional transcriptions, we hope that this initial and imperfect transcription data will provide project editors with a first pass from which they can build more robust transcriptions for scholarly editions. To some small degree, user contributed transcriptions will allow projects to reallocate resources toward the value-added materials they bring to scholarly editions in the form of annotations, glossaries, and other contextual elements.
3. The landscape of documents that user choose to transcribe will provide documentary editors with vital insights about the topics and elements of their archives that are of interest to users. This information is central to informing future efforts at outreach and to prioritizing site enhancements, such as teaching materials and digital exhibits.
4. Opening up an archive to crowdsourced transcription provides projects with an opportunity to think seriously about fostering and maintaining a vibrant community of users. Public history is meant to be public, and Scripto will help editors focus on seeking out interested users for their important holdings.

In the end, our work on Scripto and its implementation with the Papers of the War Department is an experiment in pursuing these goals. Eventually, editors from other digital documentary projects may wish to customized or extend Scripto’s functionality to serve the needs of their users and their collections, but these four essential goals will remain consistent across projects. As a free and open source tool, we have designed Scripto to be light-weight, flexible, and modular so that it represents a simple step forward for documentary editors.

The unit tests are a new addition to Scripto, and they’ve already proven their worth by pointing out bugs and stabilizing the code. I’ve decided to use the SimpleTest testing framework because of its easy setup and implementation. By running the tests on your Scripto installation, you ensure that your custom CMS adapter returns expected results, the MediaWiki API client is running correctly, and Scripto is properly bridging your CMS and MediaWiki. Peace of mind, for the developer and end user alike, is the goal here.

Soon I’ll plug Scripto into The Papers of the War Department (PWD) website for what will be the first large-scale test of the software. The PWD database has no native application programming interface, so I’ll need to write one, most likely using SimpleAPI, a personal project of mine that provides the underlying architecture for an API. Once that’s done I’ll write a PWD adapter for Scripto, install MediaWiki, and integrate a Scripto UI into the existing PWD website.

Remember that the end-user should be unconcerned about these technical details. All they’ll see is a web page containing a document image viewer and transcription form. Once we build plugins, modules, and extensions for the most common CMSs, anyone will be able to install and use Scripto!

I’m excited about the upcoming, initial phase in testing. We’ll keep you updated on the progress right here.

Jim