Releases: Princeton-CDH/startwords
Issue 2
Between the ninth and nineteenth centuries, community members in Fustat, Egypt discarded textual materials in a storeroom (or ‘geniza’) of the Ben Ezra synagogue. Today, this corpus of 350,000 fragments, which ranges from liturgical text to personal records, is known as the Cairo Geniza and fuels a global digital scholarship endeavor.
Launched in 2017, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is a multilingual crowdsourcing project intent on classifying and transcribing this corpus. An international partnership led by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and the Zooniverse—the world’s largest platform for online crowdsourced research—the project invites the public to view and decipher Cairo Geniza fragments. In doing so, the participants (#GenizaScribes) become scribes themselves. The volunteers become part of the history of this collection, converting handwritten sentences into machine-readable text and contributing their questions and insights to the project.
Features
- Data's Destinations: Three Case Studies in Crowdsourced Transcription Data Management and Dissemination
- “Strangers in the Landscape”: On Research Development and Making Things for Making
Snippets
For a list of new features, see the CHANGELOG.md file.
Issue 1
Issue 1: Transformations
Every day, countless decisions are quietly made on the basis of data most of us will never touch. Automated decision-making impacts insurance premiums and exam grades, traffic signals and pretrial risk assessments, all by relying on data captured through methods that are rarely transparent or representative. But despite the intangibility of this data, its consequences are felt in countless facets of social life: when targeted ads reflect a user’s habits back to her through a distorted mirror, or when historically biased training data move a job applicant’s resume to the bottom of the pile. We constantly feel the effects of data even if we can’t put our finger on them.
The first issue of Startwords includes "Data Beyond Vision", "Their Data, Ourselves: Illness as Information", and supplementary content. For a list of new features, see the CHANGELOG.md file.
Read this issue at https://startwords.cdh.princeton.edu/issues/1/.