Crowdsourcing and Humanities Research
If you have a University or Bodleian Reader’s card, you can get to the Centre for Digital Scholarship through the Mackerras Reading Room on the first floor of the Weston Library, around the gallery. If you do not have access to the Weston Library you are more than welcome to attend the talk: please contact Pip Willcox before the event (pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).
Is crowdsourcing a viable tool for literary historians and critics to use in their research? How might the fruits of crowdsourced projects be used for both close and ‘distant’ reading in the humanities? This talk will provide an overview of ‘Shakespeare’s World’: a collaboration between the world-leading academic crowdsourcing group called Zooniverse.org (Oxford) the Folger Shakespeare Library which heads up the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project, and the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Shakespeare’s World’ invites members of the public to transcribe manuscript material from the Folger collection. The outcomes will be incorporated into the Folger catalogue, and be made freely available for research. This talk will provide some early findings and visualizations of the resulting data.

Dr Victoria Van Hyning completed her doctoral work at the University of Sheffield, in the department of English Language and Literature, where she held a British Library co-doctoral award. Her work focused on English nuns in exile between 1550 and 1800, and their literary activities. Shortly after completing her doctoral studies she began work at Zooniverse, in Oxford, as the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, and led the development of AnnoTate (with Tate Britain), Science Gossip (with the Biodiversity Heritage Library) and ‘Shakespeare’s World’. She now holds a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the English Faculty at Oxford, is the Humanities PI of Zooniverse, and a JRF at Pembroke College.
Date: 17 May 2016, 13:00 (Tuesday, 4th week, Trinity 2016)
Venue: Weston Library, Broad Street OX1 3BG
Venue Details: Centre for Digital Scholarship
Speaker: Victoria Van Hyning (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Bodleian Libraries
Organiser: Pip Willcox (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Host: Pip Willcox (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford)
Part of: Research Uncovered: public talks on digital scholarship
Booking required?: Required
Booking url: http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/digital/2016/04/26/victoriavanhyning/
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Pip Willcox