Digital Knowledge: Smithsonian Transcription Center

Enter the #volunpeers

For my first ever participation in GLAM crowdsourcing, I decided to try Smithsonian (SI) Transcription Center (TC). This decision was driven by the sheer popularity of TC – centered in a myriad of research articles in addition to a catchy social media hashtag “volunpeers.” TC also has an incredible number of transcribed objects, with over a million transcriptions to date from a community of over eighty thousand volunteers (https://transcription.si.edu/)! The attraction of transcribing for TC can also be a found in SI’s yearly patronage; 30.2 million visitors from 20 different museums, galleries and zoos in 2016 alone (https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/about/stats).

Numbers aside, the most important factor that drives participation is the opportunity to preserve and discover one’s own cultural heritage. Volunteers on TC have made history by unveiling previously obscured names of profession and amateur Women botanists who have contributed samples to the U.S. National Herbarium¹². Names like Ellen Quillin, a botanist who saved her San Antonio Museum during the Great Depression, are now properly recognized, and credited for their work. Other important works are now available for full-text search only because of the work volunteers have accomplished on TC. This work contributes to a shared knowledge creation encouraged by GLAM institutions and paramount to their continued existence.

Engaging with TC

Sitting down to transcribe my first object on TC was a straightforward process. When I finally settled on the transcription object’s page of intermediate difficulty (TC ranks transcriptions from one to five; one being the easiest and five being the hardest), I was prompted with a set a community guidelines and instructions for using the platform. After learning how the platform functions, I went to work on a mostly transcribed page—correcting previous errors and adding my own additions. I corrected a zero that I interpreted as a nine, but it was hard to tell. Additionally, the object also included a handwritten signature that I deduced to being the same name as on the official letterhead.

Once I was ready to submit, I was met with a surprisingly easy security question (i.e., add two numbers) that could be potentially exploited in some way. Submission marked the transcription object for review by another volunteer, which could be marked for additional edits before completion. During this whole process I was never prompted for signing up even though that option exists—all transcription work can be done without creating a login.

Crowdsourcing in GLAM

Overall, I had a pleasant experience volunteering for TC. Being my first ever interaction with a transcription platform I had some concerns before making my first edit—will my work be sufficient for the task? This is thought can cross through most volunteer’s minds, but it is impossible to create the perfect transcription. The strive for personal perfection should be cast aside for the preservation of humanities’ knowledge writ large.

I laud SI for creating and maintaining such a flexible platform for crowdsourcing projects. The flexibility of TC directly effects the number of objects being transcribed³. It is of utmost importance that SI maintains this flexibility—a more guided approach could turn volunteers away from TC or other platforms. When a GLAM institution decides to utilize crowdsourcing for their next project, focus should put on the least amount of friction as possible for volunteer to engage with the system. No one human should have to jump through hoops in the pursuit of knowledge creation and preservation.

1. Wright, A. (2016). How the Smithsonian Institution Is Crowdsourcing History. Atlas Obscura.
   https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-smithsonian-is-crowdsourcing-history ↩︎
2. Kapsalis, E. (2016). Making History with Crowdsourcing. https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/doi/abs/10.1177/155019061601200211 ↩︎
3. Parilla, L., & Ferriter, M. (2016). Social Media and Crowdsourced Transcription of Historical Materials at the Smithsonian Institution: Methods for Strengthening Community Engagement and Its Tie to Transcription Output. The American Archivist, 79(2), 438–460. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-79.2.438 ↩︎