This is a transcript of the talk I gave at
Digital Frontiers 2012.
Abstract: One of the ironies of the Internet age is that traditional standards
for accessibility have changed radically. Intelligent members of the
public refer to undigitized manuscripts held in a research library as
"locked away", even though anyone may study the well-cataloged,
well-preserved material in the library's reading room. By the
standard of 1992, institutionally-held manuscripts are far more
accessible to researchers than uncatalogued materials in private
collections -- especially when the term "private collections" includes
over-stuffed suburban filing cabinets or unopened boxes inherited from
the family archivist. In 2012, the democratization of digitization
technology may favor informal collections over institutional ones,
privileging online access over quality, completeness, preservation and
professionalism.
Will the "cult of the amateur" destroy scholarly and archival
standards? Will crowdsourcing unlock a vast, previously invisible
archive of material scattered among the public for analysis by
scholars? How can we influence the headlong rush to digitize through
education and software design? This presentation will discuss the
possibilities and challenges of mass digitization for amateurs,
traditional scholars, libraries and archives, with a focus on
handwritten documents.
My presentation is on bilateral digitzation: digitization done by
institutions and by individuals outside of institutions and the wall
that's sort of in between institutions and individuals.
In 1823, a young man named Jeremiah White Graves moved to Pittsylvania
County, Virginia and started working as a clerk in a country store.
Also that year he started recording a diary and journal of his
experiences. He maintained this diary for the next fifty-five years, so
it covers his experience -- his rise to become a relatively prominent
landowner, tobacco farmer, and slaveholder. It covers the Civil War, it
covers Reconstruction and the aftermath. (This is an entry covering
Lee's surrender.)
In addition to the diary, he kept account books that give you details of
plantation life that range from -- that you wouldn't otherwise see in
the diaries.
So for example, this is his daughter Fanny,
And this is a
list of every single article of clothing that she took with her when she went off to a
boarding school for a semester.
Perhaps more interesting, this is a
memorandum of cash payments that he
made to certain of his enslaved laborers for work on their customary
holidays -- another sort of interesting factor.
I got interested in this because I'm interested in the property that he
lived in. The house that he built is now in my family, and I was doing
some research on this. Since these account books include details of
construction of the house, I spent a lot of time looking for these
books. I've been looking for them for about the last ten years.
I got in contact with some of the descendants of Jeremiah White Graves
and found out through them that one of their ancestors had donated the
diaries to the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. I looked
into getting them digitized and tried to get some collaboration [going]
with some of the descendants, and one of them in particular, Alan
Williams, was extremely helpful to me. But this was his reaction:
Okay. So we have diaries that are put in a library -- I believe one of
the top research libraries in the country -- and they are behind a wall.
They are locked away from him.
So let's talk about walls. From his perspective, the fact that these
diaries--these family manuscripts of his--are in the Alderman Library
means:
- They're professionally conserved -- great!
- They're publicly accessible, so anyone can walk in and look at them in
the Reading Room.
- They're cataloged, which would not be the case if they'd still been
sitting in his family.
- On the down side, they're a thousand miles away: they're in Virginia,
he's in Florida, I'm in Texas. We all want to look at these, but it's
awfully hard for people to get there if we don't have research budgets.
- We have to deal with reading room restrictions if we actually get there.
- Once we work on getting things digitized we have these
permission-to-publish that we need to deal with, which have some moral
challenges for someone from whose family these diaries came from.
- And we have the scanning fees: the cost of getting them scanned by the
excellent digitization department at the Alderman Library is a thousand
dollars. Which is not unreasonable, but it's still pretty costly.
So here's a wall--a real, physical wall--between this institution and
the public. How do we get through walls? Everyone here is familiar
with digitization and collaboration. This is how we share things
nowadays. It's how we've been sharing things for the last fifteen
years, in fact. But, at least fifteen years ago, when we got started
doing digitization, we had shallow digitization.
The prevalent practice in institutions was "scan-and-dump": make some
scans, put them in a repository online.
One of the problems with that is that you have very limited metadata.
The metadata is usually institutionally-oriented. No transcripts, in
particular -- nobody has time for this. And quite often, they're in
software platforms that are not crawlable by search engines.
Now meanwhile, amateurs are digitizing things, and they're doing
something that's actually even worse! They
are producing full
transcripts, but they're not attaching them to any facsimiles. They're
not including any provenance information or information about where
their sources came from. Their editorial decisions about expanding
abbreviations or any other sorts of modernizations or things like that
-- they're invisible; none of those are documented.
Worst of all, however, is that the way that these things are propagated
through the Internet is through cut-and-paste: so quite often from a
website to a newsgroup to emails, you can't even find the original
person who typed up whatever the source material was.
So how do we get to deep digitization and solve both of these problems?
The challenges to institutions, in my opinion, come down to funding and
manpower. As we just mentioned, generally archives don't have a staff
of people ready to produce documentary editions and put them online.
Outside institutions, the big challenge is standards; it is
expertise. You've got manpower, you've got willingness, but you've got
a lot of trouble making things work using the sorts of methodologies
that have come out of the scholarly world and have been developed over
the last hundred years.
So how do we fix these challenges?
One possible solution for institutions is crowdsourcing. We've talked
about this this morning; we don't need to go into detail about what
crowdsourcing is, but I'd like to talk a little bit about who
participates in crowdsourcing projects and what kinds of things they can
do and what this says about [crowdsourcing projects]. I've got three
examples here.
OldWeather.org is a project from GalaxyZoo, the
Zooniverse/
Citizen Science Alliance. The
Zenas Matthews Diary was
something that I collaborated with the
Southwestern University Smith Library Special Collections on. And the
Harry Ransom Center's Manuscript Fragments Project.
Okay, in Old Weather there are Royal Navy logbooks that record
temperature measurements every four hours: the midshipman of the watch
would come out on deck and record barometric pressure, wind speed, wind
direction and temperature. This is of incredible importance for climate
scientists because you cannot point a weather satellite at the south
Pacific in 1916. The problem is that it's all handwritten and you need
humans to transcribe this.
They launched this project three years ago, I believe, and they're done.
They've transcribed all the Royal Navy logs from the period essentially
around World War I -- all in triplicate. So blind triple keying every
record. And the results are pretty impressive.
Each individual volunteer's transcripts tend to be
about 97% accurate.
For every thousand logbook entries, three entries are going to be wrong
because of volunteer error. But this compares pretty favorably with the
ten that are actually honestly illegible, or indeed the three that are
the result of the midshipman of the watch confusing north and south.
So in terms of participation, OldWeather has gotten transcribed
more than 1.6 million weather observations--again, all triple-keyed--through
the efforts of sixteen thousand volunteers who've been transcribing
pages from a million pages of logs.
So what this means is that you have a mean contribution of one hundred
transcriptions per user.
But that statistic is worthless!
Because you don't have individual volunteers transcribing one hundred
things apiece. You don't have an even distribution. This is a
color map of contributions per user. Each user has a square. The size of the
square represents the quantity of records that they transcribed. And
what you can see here is that of those 1.6 million records, fully a
tenth (in the left-hand column) were transcribed by only ten users.
So we see this in other projects. This is a power-law distribution in
which most of the contributions are made by a hand-full of
"well-informed enthusiasts". I've
talked elsewhere about how this is
true in small projects as well. What I'd like to talk about here is
some of the implications.
One of the implications is that very small projects can work: This is
the Zenas Matthews Diaries that were transcribed on FromThePage by one
single volunteer -- one well-informed enthusiast in fourteen days.
Before we had announced the project publicly he found it, transcribed
the entire 43-page diary from the Mexican-American War of a Texas
volunteer, went back and made two hundred and fifty revisions to those
pages, and added two dozen footnotes.
This also has implications for the kinds of tasks you can ask volunteers
to do. This is the Harry Ransom Center Manuscript Fragments Project in
which the Ransom Center has a number of fragments of medieval
manuscripts that were later used in binding for later works, and they're
asking people to identify them so that perhaps they can reassemble them.
So here's
a posting on Flickr. They're saying, "Please identify this in
the comments thread."
And look: we've got people volunteering
transcriptions of exactly what this is: identifying, "Hey, this is the
Digest of Justinian, oh, and this is where you can go find this."
This is true even for smaller, more difficult fragments.
Here we have
one user going through and identifying just the left hand fragment of
this chunk of manuscript that was used for binding.
So crowdsourcing and deep digitization has a virtuous cycle in my opinion. You go through and you try to engage volunteers to come do this kind of work. That generates deep digitization which means that these resources are findable. And because they're findable, you can find more volunteers.
I've had this happen recently with a personal project,
transcribing my great-great grandmother's diary. The current top volunteer on this is a
man named Nat Wooding. He's a retired data analyst from Halifax County,
Virginia. He's transcribed a hundred pages and indexed them in six
months. He has no relationship whatsoever to the diarist.
But his great uncle was the postman who's mentioned in the diaries, and
once we had a few pages worth of transcripts done, he went online and
did a vanity search for "Nat Wooding", found the postman--
also named Nat Wooding--discovered that that was his great uncle and has become a
volunteer.
Here's the example: this is just a scan/facsimile. Google can't read this.
Google can read this, and find Nat Wooding.
Now I'd like to turn to non-institutional digitization. I said
"bilateral" -- this means, what happens when the public initiates
digitization efforts. What are the challenges--I mentioned standards--how can we fix those. And why is this important?
Well, there is this--what I call the Invisible Archive, of privately
held materials throughout the country and indeed the world. And most of
it is not held by private collectors that are wealthy, like private art
collectors. They are someone's great aunt who has things stashed away
in filing cabinets in her basement. Or worse, they are the heirs of
that great aunt, who aren't interested and have them stuck in boxes in
their attic. We have primary sources here of non-notable subjects, that
are very hard to study because you can't get at them.
But this is a problem that has been solved, outside of manuscripts.
It's been solved with photographs. It's been solved by Flickr.
Nowadays, if you want to find photographs of African-American girls from
the 1960s on tricycles, you can find them on Flickr. Twenty years ago,
this was something that was irretrievable. So Flickr is a good example,
and I'd like to use it to describe how we might be able to apply it to
other fields.
So, in terms of solving the standards problem, amateur digitization has
a bad, bad reputation, as you can see
here.
And much of that bad
reputation is deserved, and isn't specific to digitization. This
has been a problem with print editions in the past, it is a problem online
now. Frankly, scholars don't trust the materials because they're not up
to standard.
How do we solve this? Collaboration: we'd like to see more
participation from people who are scholars, who are trained archivists,
who are trained librarians to participate in some of these projects.
One of the ones I'm working with [is] digitizing these registers from the
Reformation up to the present. We're building this generalizable,
open-source, crowdsourced transcription tool and indexing tool for
structured data. We'd love to find archivists to tell us what to do,
what not to do, and to collaborate with us on this.
Another solution is community. You don't go on Flickr just to share
your photos; you go on Flickr to learn to become a better photographer.
And I think that creating platforms and creating communities that can
come up with these standards and enforce them among themselves can
really help.
The same thing is true with software platforms, if they actually prompt
users and say: "when you're uploading this image, tell us about the
provenance." "Maybe you might want to scan the frontispieces." "Maybe you'd like to tell us the history of ownership."
Those are the things that I think might get us there. I've just hit my
time limit, I think, so thanks a lot!
Ben Brumfield is a family historian and independent software engineer. For the
last seven years he has been developing FromThePage, an open source
manuscript transcription tool in use by libraries, museums, and family
historians. He is currently working with FreeUKGen to create an open source system for indexing images and transcribing structured, hand-written material.
Contact Ben at benwbrum@gmail.com.
