A computational pipeline for crowdsourced transcriptions of Ancient Greek papyrus fragments

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, two excavators from the University of Oxford uncovered a vast trove of naturally deteriorated papyri, numbering over 500,000 fragments, from the city of Oxyrhynchus. With varying levels and forms of deterioration, the identification of a papyrus fragment can become a repetitive, long, and exhausting process for a professional papyrologist. The University of Oxford's Ancient Lives project aims to accelerate the identification process through citizen science (or crowdsourcing). In the Ancient Lives interface, volunteer users identify letters by clicking on a location in the image to designate the presence of a letter. To date, over 7 million letter identifications from users across the world have been recorded in the Ancient Lives database. In this paper, we present a computational pipeline for converting crowdsourced letter identifications made through the Ancient Lives interface into digital consensus transcriptions of papyrus fragments. We conclude by explaining the usefulness of the pipeline output in the context of additional computational projects that aim to further accelerate the identification process.

Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research

“…However, with the emergence of crowdsourcing as a cyberinfrastructure, the accessibility of both volunteer and paid labor is greater than ever before. Digital humanities scholarship offers numerous online crowdsourcing projects dedicated to the transcription of ancient manuscripts, e.g., Ancient Lives [91], Old Weather [96], AnnoTate [95], Transcribe Bentham [85], Operation War Diary [97], etc. Similar to citizen science, technology enables crowd-powered manuscript processing to generate new sources of research data at an unprecedented speed and scale.…”

Evaluating the Usability and the Personal and Social Acceptance of a Participatory Digital Platform for Cultural Heritage

“…Several cultural heritage digital platforms, systems and applications have included the idea of active user participation as a core or complementary service in their design and implementation [10][11][12][13]. Participatory cultural heritage digital platforms offer individuals the capability to become active parts in generating, collecting, exploring and notifying cultural heritage knowledge.…”

“…The idea of active user participation in generating, collecting and contributing personal content is not new to digital cultural heritage [10][11][12][13]. Mia Ridge in Reference [14] states that "crowdsourcing in cultural heritage is more than a framework for creating content: as a form of engagement with the collections and research of memory institutions, it benefits both audiences and institutions."…”

The smell of us – crowdsourcing human body odor evaluation

“…Groups of human agents, coordinated over the internet, can be effectively directed to solve large scale problems (Brabham, Ribisl, Kirchner, & Bernhardt, 2014). These strategies especially benefit from access to higher cognitive functions and unique human aptitudes including those for image analysis (Candido Dos Reis et al, 2015) and pattern recognition (Williams et al, 2014). Even where individual opinions show high variance, the central tendency of many human-derived estimates can be highly informative (Galton, 1907).…”