Europeana Transcribe Project
The online portal Europeana Transcribe on Transcribathon.eu is a crowdsourcing and citizen science project to transcribe, enrich, annotate historical documents from the Europeana-Portal.
The idea behind Transcribathon.eu is to enrich digitised heritage material, and improve the material, allowing the contents to be read, searched and used. By enriching and improving the transcribers are competing with each other.
Transcribathon.eu was developed from 2018 to 2020 in the EnrichEuropeana project. Further improvement was made by the project EnrichEuropeanaPlus, which started in 2021, and combined human expertise with artificial intelligence to make historical documents from the 19th century accessible.
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. The project was a Europeana Generic Services Project and was co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.
STORIES OF THE MONTH
May 23, 2023: Honorary Mention European Union Prize for Citizen Science
Jury Statement: „Europeana gives access to millions of cultural heritage items from institutions across Europe such as libraries, archives, museums or galleries. All of them share their media such as images, music or texts with a network of aggregating citizen scientists who enrich it with additional information. This hard work is designed as a creative, fresh as well as thought-provoking process, that in an unorthodox way empowers us to critically engage with our cultural heritage.“
UPDATE 2022
December 20, 2022: Post by Fiona Park, Content Manager READ-COOP SCE, and Philip Kahle, Software Developer, READ COOP on Europeana Pro: Handwriting recognition technology enhances the Transcribathon platform
Prototype 2016
The transcription tool Transcribe e1914-1918 was developed by Facts & Files and Olaf Baldini as a prototype for Europeana 1914-1918. The developement was funded by the Bundesbeauftragte für Kultur und Medien (BKM). For the documents on Europeana1914-1918.eu the tool was updated, and presented at the Europeana Network Association Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Riga on November 7, 2016. See for further information on the Transcribathon in Riga here.