The Human-Computer Interaction Lab hosts Dr. James Brusuelas from the University of Oxford, speaking on crowdsourcing, the humanities, and the Ancient Lives project.
Abstract
When Ancient Lives (AL) first launched in 2011, it was immediately evident that the general public was up for the task of transcribing ancient Greek papyrus fragments online. But its immediate success as a crowdsourcing project also created a unique data processing dilemma. What does one actually do with over a million clicks, millions of individual Greek characters, millions of x and y coordinates? The subsequent application of machine learning and even bioinformatics algorithms has resulted in the first stage of successful processing. There is sense. There are consensus transcriptions. Now, as we look towards a newly re-launched AL in 2017, this talk will first review project achievements thus far, including both lingering problems and the new AL web application, and then discuss the future direction of AL in the bigger context of how its data can and should be mined. Visit the Ancient Lives website
Bio
Dr. James H. Brusuelas is a Researcher in Papyrology and Digital Philology at the University of Oxford where he practices and studies philology in the digital humanities. He is one of the leading researchers behind the Ancient Lives crowdsourcing project and is the leading researcher behind the forthcoming Proteus platform, a philological environment for the creation of born digital critical editions of Greek and Latin literary and subliterary papyri. James’s offline work focuses on editing and contributing to publication efforts for the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection and other papyrological works, such as Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Continued. Part IV. Anonymous Biographical Papyri.