'By the People' Crowdsourcing Datasets from the Library of Congress

Abstract

The 'By the People' ('BTP') datasets comprise text of selected collections of the Library of Congress (LOC) created by volunteers in the 'By the People' crowdsourced transcription program, which invites public transcription of historical documents. All transcriptions are created and reviewed by volunteers in a consensus-based model in which two or more volunteers must agree on a transcription for it to be considered complete. Resulting transcriptions are added to the digital collections alongside the images to enable search and accessibility of the collections. Additionally, completed transcription “campaigns” are published as freely downloadable datasets of .CSV files containing all campaign transcriptions, as well as minimal metadata. The datasets can support a multitude of purposes including computational research in fields such as history, linguistics, economics, and political science.

Keywords

• crowdsourcing
• text
• transcription
• cultural heritage
• accessibility
• handwritten text recognition