Allyssa Guzman
Digital Scholarship Librarian
University of Texas at Austin
Albert Palacios
Digital Scholarship Coordinator
University of Texas at Austin
This National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities-funded project arises from the growing consensus that the digital humanities needs to do more to promote and support cultural and linguistic diversity. In order to provide an avenue for non-English literate communities to meaningfully engage and contribute to the digital humanities, we completed the interface internationalization and translation of an open source digital scholarship platform–FromThePage. FromThePage (FtP) is a tool for the collaborative transcription, translation, and indexing of primary source materials, particularly those that are handwritten or not readable by optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. Cultural repositories are increasingly using FtP to tap into the collective expertise of an interested public to improve the intellectual accessibility of handwritten sources and nourish their archival records. However, our research shows that few institutions have considered the subsequent preservation and ethical attribution of these citizen contributions in the archival record and scholarship. Part two of this project seeks to enhance FromThePage’s collection management capabilities and exports to facilitate the development of workflows for preserving and adequately attributing collaborative scholarship for its ethical reuse. Our immediate goal for undertaking this work is twofold: 1) to break down barriers to access University of Texas Libraries’ Spanish and Portuguese-language digital collections that have resulted from anglocentric technology stacks, and 2) to collaborate with current Latin American partners in the interpretation of their digitized collections hosted on our servers.
https://www.fromthepage.lib.utexas.edu
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/82152