Digital Humanities: Conference Paper: “Crowdsourcing Performing Arts History with NYPL’s ENSEMBLE”

Here’s a new conference paper by Doug Reside from the New York Public Library. He’ll formally present the paper (tomorrow, July 11, 2014) at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, France.

Title

Crowdsourcing Performing Arts History with NYPL’s ENSEMBLE

Author

Doug Reside
New York Public Library

Source

Digital Humanities 2014 Web Site

From the Introduction

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts holds in its collection over one million programs documenting a large number of the major theater, music, and dance events performed around the country since the end of the Civil War. Although the collection grows each month, the Library estimates that it currently holds approximately 125,000 dance, 400,000 music, and over one million theater programs.
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In early 2013, motivated both by our responsibility to preserve these artifacts and out of a desire to better expose the data they contain, we launched an effort to create digital images of our program collection and organize a crowd-sourced effort to transcribe and structure the information contained within it.  The project, launched in beta under the name Ensemble in June of 2013, is now part of a new NEH-funded Digital Humanities Implementation grant to create tools for crowd-sourced transcription projects.  This paper will discuss the lessons the team learned from the beta release as well as the modifications we are planning for the upcoming full release in 2014.

Direct to Full Text Paper (approx 1300 Words)
Direct to NYPL’s ENSEMBLE Project Website
ENSEMBLE is a project of NYPL Labs
Direct to @ensemblenypl
Direct to @DougReside
See Also: More Papers From Digital Humanities 2014

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