Contribution Accountant Project @ E-Scripts

This is a Java Application connected with the Emergent Transcriptions System, which represents an attempt at streamlining the process of “unearthing” the largely-untapped goldmine of historical knowledge contained in handwritten manuscripts stored in the archives all around the world. The basic idea is to make it possible for scholars to easily access the historical information contained in ancient manuscripts by instituting a virtuous cycle of automatically-accruing and ever-improving transcriptions of these ancient records.

Please, read the paper entitled Making History: an Emergent System for the Systematic Accrual of Transcriptions of Historic Manuscripts for more detailed information.

The Contribution Accountant v.0.1

The Contribution Accountant™ (CA) is an open-source Java application that runs on a Linux™ machine running an Apache™ server with a MySQL™ database backend. This may or may not reside on the same server as the Archive Assistant (AA).

The object of this project is to produce an unobtrusive and semi-transparent accounting system that will keep track of the contributions made by each transcriber in order to attribute appropriate credit to the authors that submit new or improved transcriptions. Such contributions are rewarded by a sort of “monopoly money” that can be used to acquire advanced services from our system as discussed above. Transcribers would also be rewarded through an automatic academic citation system that recognizes an author’s contribution as a bona-fide intellectual property which ought to be properly referenced whenever an author’s transcription is used in a project or cited in a paper.

The credit system is predicated on the registration of each user and on the system’s ability to unequivocally recognize legitimate users through passwords. After registering, users will receive a virtual “bank account” where their credits will be posted by the CA. Users will also immediately be assigned a “credibility rating” not too dissimilar to the “reputation management system” used to rate e-bay™ sellers or slash-dot™ contributors [8].

The essence of the CA accounting system is based on before-and-after comparisons between what the AA sent out to the user and what comes back from the user for each manuscript page, through the Transcription Assistant (TA) module. A differential engine will quantify the number of changes made to the original transcription as well as to the word boxes in the manuscript image. The net change will be the basis for the credit awarded to the user. However, to avoid spurious submissions from users bent on “gaming” the system, the initial credit would be awarded on a provisional basis as a percentage of the total earned by the transaction. The “discounted” rate of the temporary credit will be based on the credit-worthiness of the user, which depends on his or her credibility, which is accrued over time, by indirect peer review.

Peers will in essence show peers their approval by implicitly confirming the quality of submitted changes, simply by not providing additional corrections to what the original contributor had provided. A sort of silent consent will thus enhance the credibility of users whose submissions pass muster with subsequent users. In addition to this process, which I term “dynamic accreditation”, some archives may choose to start from an official list of fully accredited professionals to expedite the process of accreditation, using a form of “a priori accreditation”

For the time being, we will assume that each archive will manage its own user accounts, but the aim is to arrive at a universal registration system that will maintain the distributed and emergent nature of the overall system without compromising the quality of the transcriptions that bubble up to the top of the heap after successive refinements by a variety of contributors.

Users will accumulate “transcription credits” and “word box credits” (possibly on different “pay scales”) when they make contributions to the system. Credits will in turn be usable to pay for such services as: on-demand scanning of manuscripts, handwriting recognition assistance, remote storage of project files on the archive servers, automatic transcription processing, advanced searching, and others.

FABIO CARRERA [Home, Bio, News, Teaching, Research, Publications, Grants, Service, Contact]