The ALLC elections for 2010 are now underway.

Nominations are now invited for three Committee posts, each to serve a 3-year term, and for one Committee post to serve a 2-year term.

And a new Chair needs to be chosen and elected, too.

Any DHers out there who subscribe to LLC (joint membership, or membership of ALLC) are eligible to stand. Being on the committee means that you get to contribute to the running of the association, perhaps also initiatives on the ADHO level, and the running of the various journals. As well as a great thing to have on your CV, its a good way to understand more about the workings of academic associations, conferences, and journals. Its also a great way to get to meet other DH people from across Europe. All this for a couple of meetings a year.

We really need new blood in the committee, and a few individuals who have been very involved for the past decade are now moving on. Do stand for election if you are interested. And do take the time to vote!

More info about the elections here.

But working in the cloud is not as bad as it would have been even a few years ago. I had an interesting exchange with a ticket collector yesterday at Kings Cross station – my train was delayed, so I was hanging out on the platform alongside a train that offers free wifi, picking up email and docs on my iPhone whilst waiting. “Are you travelling with us today, madam?” “only online, sir”.

Its not ideal, at the end of term, to be a bit of an internet hobo, but heck, at least all my email records, calendars, etc didnt dissapear into scrambled electron soup. And my new docking station arrived yesterday. Fingers crossed a new machine will arrive to dock into it in the next day or so…

Today is the day of DH! over 150 people in digital humanities will be blogging throughout the day, saying what they are up to, and showing the diversity of the discipline.

So, when I announced the Bentham Transcription Initiative (which will soon have its own website, we are working on things behind the scenes) I said it was a “highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work”. I firmly believe that: I don’t know of any other large scale transcription attempt of correspondence that is opening things up to crowdsourcing, and our project has a broad remit, producing an open source tool, whilst undertaking user studies on the use of crowdsourcing in cultural heritage application.

But that is not to say that there are not other crowdsourcing projects out there (and I’m sorry if I implied that!). I have had very interesting exchanges with quite a few people, and so I thought I’d draw a few other projects to your attention, if you are interested in community based online cultural heritage projects (and beyond).

• There is huge amateur interest in genealogy, and the Free Births, Marriages and Death (FreeBMD) register have been transcribing the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records.
• “Small and Special” has been using volunteer effort to create a database relating to the early years of The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, including patient admission records and articles.
• The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre have an interest in transcription of cultural material, and they’ve been doing some very exploratory work in crowd-sourcing transcription.
• The National Library of Australia’s Australian Newspapers is using crowd sourcing to correct the OCR of digitised Australian newspapers and with some contributors correcting hundreds of thousands of lines of text.
• The USGS North American Bird Phenology program encouraged volunteers to submit bird sightings across North America from the 1880s through the 1970s. These cards are now being transcribed into a database for analysis of migratory pattern changes and what they imply about climate change.

Then there is the idea that building an online tool to help transcribing manuscripts is novel. There are a good few things out there, it turns out.

• Ben Brumfield was kind enough to point out his blog, Collaborative Manuscript Transcription, which has both links to projects and tools, as well as considering the types of things one has to keep in mind when designing an online tool for transcribing texts. Ben has also developed his own system, http://beta.fromthepage.com/, software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents online. We’ll be looking at it closely.
• The MediaWiki ProofreadPage plugin has been developed for many print transcription projects and a few manuscript projects. Current English-language projects using the plugin are listed there (and there are quite a few).
• The BYU Historic Journals Project has developed an online transcription tool. The server seems to be down for maintenance (http://journals.byu.edu/) but there is a video online which demonstrates how they have been using their online tool for both searching and creating information.
• The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Emergent Transcriptions/Transcription Assistant software system has also been pointed out, you can see more at E-Scripts@ WPI and Uscript.org.
• The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre have produced a tool called OpenScribe (Online Volunteer Transcription Service) which is based on a slightly-modified Drupal installation, the source-code for which is hosted in svn on Google Code. They have developed another tool, Remote Writer, which provides a web-based word-processor GUI for someone to easily markup text to xhtml which can then be translated to TEI using stylesheets, and is how they have enabled non-technical contributors to create the content found at sites such as Turbine literary journal and Best New Zealand Poems.
• The SCRATCH (SCRipt Analysis Tools for the Cultural Heritage) project is exploring methods for automated information retrieval and analysis in large collections of scanned handwritten-document images. That’s a slightly difference focus to the rest of the projects named here, but I include it as it may be of interest.

So that’s the round up so far. Richard Davis, the developer from ULCC who is working on the Bentham project with us, has also posted an overview of who he has been chatting to. Once we get the project name, domain name, and website sorted out, we’ll be posting lots of updates about our development of the tool – keeping the project as open as possible, in all kinds of ways.

If you know of any other cultural heritage projects using crowdsourcing, in particular for manuscript material, then please do get in touch. And if you hear about any other online manuscript environments we need to be aware of, drop us a line too! We wont be getting properly stuck into the Bentham Transcription project til RA’s are appointed (closing date for applications March 8th…. ) but it is good to learn what else is out there.

Update: I forgot to mention the “International Amateur Scanning League” which is a crowdsourcing digitisation project to digitise material from the USA’s National Archives and Records Administration. Its a different focus – digitisation rather then transcription – but what a great name! They have a badge, and everything!

The Bentham Transcription Initiative – a UCL based ambitious and ground-breaking project which will increase access to and encourage user participation with the papers of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) – is now hiring for two postdoc research associates. Both posts are available immediately and funded for one year in the first instance.

Research Associate: The post holder will co-ordinate the various aspects of the project. They will write up the documentation for the amateur transcribers, run the publicity campaign which will recruit them, act as moderator of the submitted transcripts, and help to draft the qualitative user study and the final report.

Research Associate (IT): The post holder will be working with another Research Associate and the web developer to create an attractive and intuitive interface. They will take responsibility for the mark-up of the existing transcripts from MS Word into TEI compliant XML, link the digital images to the existing database catalogue and the transcription tool, and help draft user documentation and a qualitative user study. Although a post-doc is preferred, applicants with relevant experience but no PhD will be considered if they can demonstrate they have the desired skill set. Please contact us if you are unsure whether to apply, or whether your experience matches our requirements.

Closing date for both applications is 8th March 2010. Please get in touch (m.terras@ucl.ac.uk) if you have any queries, or want further information.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been merrily creating camera ready copy in my downtime for a print volume of the the DHQ issue I edited alongside Greg Crane (Tufts/Perseus): Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure.

Just to let you know, its now in press. And the joy of camera ready copy (after the pain of pasting lovely, well formed, XML into nasty, petulant, MicroSoft Word templates) is that the turnaround should be pretty quick. Heck, its already up on the Gorgias Press website… expect a “real” book in the next four weeks or so!

The Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with support from the British Library, in Summer 2010 on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

The Digital Classicist seminars run on Friday afternoons from June to August in Senate House, London. In previous years collected papers from the DC WiP seminars have been published* in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9); we anticipate similar publication opportunities for future series. A small budget is available to help with travel costs.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract to gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk by
March 31st 2010. We shall announce the full programme in April.

Regards,

The organizers
Gabriel Bodard, King’s College London
Stuart Dunn, King’s College London
Juan Garcés, Greek Manuscripts Department, British Library
Simon Mahony, University College London
Melissa Terras, University College London

* See http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/4/ (2006), http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=1064&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_id=9797&edition_id=12252 (2007), http://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/index.html (2008-9).

I’m part of the JISC funded project LinkSphere at Reading University. They are building an online social media tool to do cross institutional repository searching, and facility research relationships. While the guys there are getting up to speed on programming the first demos, we set our research assistant, Claire Ross, a task: why not write up a paper on how people use social media. And why not do one on twitter. And why not study how Digital Humanities folks use it, within conference settings (thereby giving a nice corpus on which to base the study).

The results are here. A nice full, paper which has been submitted to a journal for consideration. Let us know if you have any comments!

You may have noticed our very nice logo for the new UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Our designer (one of my PhD students, Rudolf Ammann) has just posted an overview of the process of designing a logo for a DH Centre – which makes for interesting reading.