Think History – Go Digital!

Facts & Files Digital Services GmbH is developing digital tools for crowdsourcing projects at GLAM institutions, companies and municipalities. The company was founded in May 2018. One of its first projects was the further development of www.transcribathon.eu.

The online portal Transcribathon.eu is a crowdsourcing and citizen science project for describing, annotating, transcribing and geo-referencing historical collections. The idea behind the transcription tool is to make handwritten sources more usable. This creates a competition between all registered users: the Transcribathon. The website is free and open to all.

How can museums, libraries, archives and other institutions participate?

Institutions have the opportunity to make parts of their digitized collection available on Transcribathon.eu and start their own project. To do so, please contact us! Our projects “EnrichEuropeana”, “Sachsen at Work” and “EnrichEuropeanaPlus” will give you a good idea of how your institution can benefit from our community. With users from all over Europe and a collection of 321,000 documents in various languages, Transcribathon.eu has a wide reach and the know-how to support your organization’s digital strategy.

What’s so special about Transcribathon.eu?

First of all, it’s a competition. Second, the users are not working alone. Third, all transcription are accessible for all users. And last, but not least: the transcriptions can be reviewed.

By enriching digitised heritage material, crowdsourcers can transform their data into useful digital resources. Creating machine-readable enrichments opens up new possibilities for the analysis, distribution and reuse of that material. Information that was previously only available in image formats can now be turned into text and rich data. Transcription and enrichment open up new possibilities for digital inclusion, enabling the text and data to be translated and automatically converted to audio, tactile graphics and braille.

In 2021, the EnrichEuropeanaPlus project began to update the Transcribathon platform with advanced handwriting recognition technology Transkribus, developed by READ-COOP. At the end of 2022, the new platform was launched.