Recordings Available: Crowdsourcing and the Humanities

Interested in learning more about crowdsourcing projects, data curation, and more?

Recordings from “Crowdsourcing and the Humanities: Roundtable Discussions Celebrating Scribes of the Cairo Geniza” are now available on the Princeton Geniza Lab site.

The series of conversations, which took place April 14—16, took as its starting point Scribes of the Cairo Geniza, a multilingual crowdsourcing project launched in 2017 to classify and transcribe manuscript fragments from a medieval Egyptian synagogue. Scribes of the Cairo Geniza connects with the CDH’s research partnership with the Princeton Geniza Project (PGP), a database of Geniza manuscripts.

CDH contributors to the discussions included Associate Director Natalia Ermolaev, who moderated “Platforms for People-Powered Research”; and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, CDH Lead Developer and Co-PI of the CDH-PGP Research Partnership, who facilitated “From the Technical Side: Responding to Researcher Needs.”

Marina Rustow, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Co-PI of the CDH-PGP Research Partnership, served on two panels, including “Working with Crowdsourced Textual Data,” and moderated “Who Are the #GenizaScribes?” on which Rachel Richman, Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton and project manager of the CDH-PGP research partnership, served as a panelist.

We were also happy (virtually) to welcome back former CDH postdoc Jim Casey, now Assistant Research Professor of African American Studies at Penn State University and the managing director of Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Studies.

“Crowdsourcing and the Humanities” was part of our Collections as Data Series, co-sponsored by Princeton University Library, and was in partnership with the Princeton Geniza Lab, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the Zooniverse.

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