The Shakespeare’s World Crowdsourced Transcription Project Datasets

Abstract

The Shakespeare’s World Datasets derive from a crowdsourced transcription project hosted on the Zooniverse platform between 2015 and 2019 (Van Hyning et al, 2015–2019). Volunteers transcribed 14,330 digitized early modern manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library. 3,926 registered volunteers contributed, and over 94,570 anonymous sessions representing an unknown number of individuals, were recorded. This paper presents a cleaned dataset of individual volunteer transcriptions (IVT), containing all 203,389 valid classifications, along with three supplementary social datasets for a discussion forum and blog. These datasets provide insights into the transcription process, and volunteer and project owner interactions during the project’s lifespan. The datasets have significant reuse potential in digital humanities, historical linguistics, and handwritten text recognition.

Keywords

• volunteer crowdsourcing
• transcription
• digital humanities
• early modern