Semantic Annotation in Collaborative Document Transcription: A Gamified Citizen Science Approach

Christian Ezequiel Bracco, Lucas Ezequiel Cuevas, Diego Torres

Abstract: Human or manual transcription is the task where a person reads a handwritten document and types in a digital environment the text she is reading. The manual transcription task is a long and time-consuming process for one person. However, the intelligence of the transcriber is provided with better results than automatic alternatives. This article introduces a collaborative transcription platform called Transcriptor, in which the community members can upload digitized manuscripts and collaborate in transcribing them, defining different transcription layers which will be represented using semantic web technologies and gamification techniques. The article provides two experimentation that shows that Transcriptor had a good acceptance and novelty.