Crowdsourcing Transcription: Exercise and Reflection

With this exercise, try to involve yourself for a short while in a crowd-sourcing transcription project, do some transcription or review to help with a project, observe the process and reflect on the experience.

Look for an archive where there is still transcription to do in any one of the following resources:

Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Site: Try the Browse Projects to find unfinished transcriptions, take a look at the African American History archives, or choose any other that looks interesting to you.
Transcribe Bentham (writings and documents associated with the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham). Here you will need to create an account. Choose an "Easy" resource to work with.

Now, begin working on transcription and take notes observing and reflecting on your experience as you go. Take a little time and care, at least an hour, immersed in the transcription process and recording some notes and screen captures.

Read the transcription instructions and do your best to supply some transcription or correct some existing transcription of a page.
Take screencaptures of a page to show some of the challenges of the transcription process that you can share with the class.
Notice when you have to turn to using symbols (pseudomarkup) in order to represent something about the text you are reading.
Think: What questions and issues can you identify with the transcription process? What interesting research leads could you see in the passages you tried to work on? What issues do you think people might have with reviewing and correcting transcriptions?
Comment on your experience with volunteercrowd-sourced transcription and provide screen captures of your work on our textEncoding-Hub Crowdsourcing thread for this exercise.