E-Scripts@ WPI
Emergent Transcriptions System
To date, only a
small percentage of the earth’s historical written records have been tapped
into to contribute to our knowledge of our past.
The Emergent
Transcriptions project aims at leveraging the work of the thousands of frequent
or occasional visitors of the world’s archives to accumulate and disseminate
the raw transcriptions produced by the army of researchers who are digging into
this treasure-trove of information from our antiquity. Since written records of our past are by
definition finite, our system will put in place a mechanism that promises to
capture – once and for all – the written records that our ancestors left
behind. Such an emergent system will
eliminate redundancy by gradually yet systematically creating a cumulative,
distributed, electronic repository of digital transcriptions of the written
records form our past, that can be shared and searched without duplications and
overlaps. A major element of our system
is an incentive scheme that will entice users to share freely in exchange for
some benefit that they value. One major
incentive, right off the bat, is that our applications are downloadable for
free as open-source programs. Another conditio sine qua non is that the system
that we make available to the users be truly useful to them, so that they will
want to use our system in the first place and thus become (potential)
participants in the global sharing of transcriptions. Thus, a virtuous cycle is instituted whereby
each transcriber can share his/her work and can in return benefit from the work
of others. The gradual accumulation of
transcriptions will greatly expedite the making of history in true “emergent”
fashion.
The system we are developing consists
of three main applications (click on headings for more information):
1.
The Archive
Assistant™ (AA) that runs on a manuscript server and assists archive personnel in making
manuscript images available to end users, with proper manuscript metadata;
2.
The Transcription
Assistant™ (TA) is a web-application that
facilitates the job of the researchers by making transcriptions easier to
complete, track and manage as projects.
This is the only module which is currently available in
pre-beta version.
3.
The Contribution
Accountant™ (CA) that would run on a
server to keep track of the “credits” and “debits” accumulated by each user.
For more information, read Making
History: an Emergent System for the Systematic Accrual of Transcriptions of
Historic Manuscripts which was presented at the 8th
International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR1005) in
For
questions you can contact Prof. Fabio Carrera,
director of the Emergent Systems Laboratory.
Click here to return to Emergent
Systems Lab