code, github, interactive, language, websites

DIY History

I served as lead developer on this award-winning crowdsourcing platform at the University of Iowa Libraries. The code has been made freely available on Github and has been used by over 20 research libraries and archives around the world, including Yale University, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, The Newberry Library, University College Dublin Archives, and Cambridge University. It has been featured on NBC, CNN, Wired UK, BuzzFeed, Yahoo!, Open Culture, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reddit, MetaFilter, and more. In addition it’s been used as a case-study in several scholarly works on crowdsourcing and transcription.

  • Leon, Sharon. “Build, Analyse and Generalise: Community Transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the Development of Scripto.”Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage. Ed. Mia Ridge. Ashgate Pub, 2014. 306. Print.
  • McKinley, Donelle. An Information Systems Design Theory for crowdsourcing cultural heritage. Dissertation, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
  • Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela, ed. The Routledge History of Rural America. London, United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2016. Print.
  • Unruly Hordes or Altruistic Communities?: Crowdsourcing in Academic Institutions
    Kayla Utendorf
    Middle Tennessee State University
  • Community as resource: crowdsourcing transcription of an historic newspaper.
    Caroline Daniels University of Louisville, Terri L. Holtze University of Louisville, Rachel I. Howard University of Louisville, Randy Kuehn University of Louisville.
  • Theimer, Kate. “DIY History: Redesigning a Platform for a Transcription Crowdsourcing Initiative.” Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections. Vol. 2, Outreach. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.