Welcome! This project recently migrated onto Zooniverse’s new architecture. For details, see here.
Research
About the Project
Most historic primary source materials digitized by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, through standard workflows, are subject to text recognition by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. This allows typewritten text-based content to be indexed; researchers using the Digital Heritage Center's public collections at DigitalNC.org can search across the content of primary source materials for names, locations, and other keywords. Materials with handwritten or inconsistently-printed text are left out of this workflow because OCR software cannot accurately read them. This means that machine-readable materials are more accessible through DigitalNC.org than handwritten ones.
North Carolina Primary Source Transcription is a pilot project to explore changing this. Through this project, the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center seeks to understand the challenges of crowdsourcing transcription for handwritten digital collections materials: selecting candidate materials and permissions from contributing partner institutions, gauging public interest in contributing transcriptions, using Zooniverse to collect transcription data, and integrating collected data with existing digital publishing systems for search, browse, and display at DigitalNC.org.
About the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and DigitalNC.org
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Special Collections Library. We work with North Carolina cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and more) to scan, describe, and publish historical materials online free of charge, which in turn increases access to and use of their collections by the public. The Center is supported by the State Library of North Carolina with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, and by the UNC-Chapel Hill University Library. See http://www.digitalnc.org/about/ for more information.