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Crowdsourcing Transcription of Historical Manuscripts: Citizen Science as a Force of Revealing Historical Evidence from Croatian Glagolitic Manuscripts

Citizen participation in scientific research is a topic under much discussion nowadays. As a result, citizen science and crowdsourcing have become inevitable methods in the academic environment. Crowdsourcing can be defined as a network model in which the intelligence of a large online community is used to serve the goals of a particular community or organization. This paper is a report on the project Civil Science in the Field of Glagolitics: from crowdsourcing to knowledge and it describes its first phase. The project is being conducted by the scientific Centre for Research in Glagolitism of the University of Zadar, Croatia, from 2021 to 2022. The researchers come from the Centre, as well as from the Department of Information Sciences of the University of Zadar and State Archive in Zadar, Croatia. The main objective of the project is to examine the possibilities and benefits of citizen participation in the scholarly projects in humanities, particularly the projects whose object of research are manuscripts written in historical script that present a valuable source for local history. The term historical script refers to a script that is not used nowadays as an official script in any country or community but was in use a particular period of history on a certain territory. The corpus for the pilot study conducted within this project consists of manuscripts and their fragments written in cursive form of the Croatian Glagolitic script, while the citizen participation is researched on the example of crowdsourcing transcription of manuscripts written in cursive form of the Croatian Glagolitic script. In the first phase of the project, the pilot study was conducted with the following aims: to engage the public in transcribing the local historical manuscripts written in cursive form of the Glagolitic script, and to test the feasibility, main characteristics, benefits and potentials of such crowdsourcing campaigns. The campaign was conducted in three phases, with a crowdsourcing campaign scenario developed in the first phase, and interviews with researchers and amateurs in the second and third phases. This paper presents the first phase, which is the most complex one, together with part of the results of the second phase in which interviews with researchers were conducted. The aim of the pilot study presented in this paper is to create a solid basis for involving the public in scientific projects within the disciplines of humanities whose object of research are documents written in historical scripts, namely within the field of the Croatian Glagolitics.

Crowdsourcing ; Citizen Science ; Digitization ; Digital Humanities ; collaborative manuscript transcription ; Glagolitic script ; historical script

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