FromthePage, Crowdsourced Digital Archiving (UT Libraries Instance)
As part of his PTF Initiative, Adam Rabinowitz developed two UT resources for crowd-sourcing humanities archival and historical work and student “citizen science:" FromthePage (partnered with UT Libraries) and Nanosourcer (a Canvas plugin). UT’s customized FromthePage instance is permanently supported by UT Libraries, publicly available, and has nearly 1000 users working on over a dozen different archival collections. This pilot project involved the transcription of portions of the archives of Texas lawmaker and UT founder Judge Alexander Watkins Terrell, held at UT’s Briscoe Center for American History.
This permanent UT Libraries instance is now the platform for international transcription projects supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2018) and the Pelagios Commons (2019), and the focus of a major grant from the NEH (2022), directed by Allyssa Guzman and Albert Palacios, to expand FromThePage’s multilingual capacity and develop workflows to incorporate citizen transcription contributions into archival collections.
Related Initiatives
Bevosourcing: Tools to Involve Students in Citizen Science and Online Data Publication
Digital archives and the internet have made it possible for non-experts to make major contributions to research through crowdsourcing and citizen science. UT has fascinating and important collections of primary sources for the humanities, many of which have been digitized. But before my PTF project, there were no digital tools at UT to facilitate crowdsourcing as a pedagogical strategy, engaging students with historical documents while enriching the collections themselves. The project therefore proposed to develop two UT-based crowdsourcing platforms.