Judaica DH at the Penn Libraries Blog //EVENT: Crowdsourcing and the Humanities: Roundtable Discussions Celebrating Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
Blog //EVENT: Crowdsourcing and the Humanities: Roundtable Discussions Celebrating Scribes of the Cairo Geniza

The Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at University of Pennsylvania Libraries, The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University Library, the Princeton Geniza Lab, and the Zooniverse present a series of conversations on project management and development, creation and use of data, and crowdsourcing platforms and research possibilities.

Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is a multilingual crowdsourcing project launched in 2017 to classify and transcribe manuscript fragments from a medieval Egyptian synagogue. An initiative led by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and Zooniverse, the project harnesses the power of technology and people to decipher some of the most challenging fragments in the world.

Building on the project’s work, this series of roundtable discussions will explore methods for project development and management, data curation and use, and crowdsourcing experiences in conversation with historians, developers, librarians, philologists, curators, DH practitioners, Geniza specialists, and community members around the world. We hope to engage the field at-large in a community-building exercise to reflect on our project and its connections to other crowdsourcing efforts.

This event is part of the 2020–21 “Collections as Data” series presented by the Center for Digital Humanities and Princeton University Library. Now in its third year, the series is dedicated to exploring how library, archive, and museum collections can be leveraged to support data-driven scholarship and discovery. This year’s focus is community, exploring how communities can engage with and form around data-based projects.

The event runs for 3 days, from April 14th-16th, 10 AM – 1:30 PM EDT. In these conversations, you’ll hear :

  • How Scribes of the Cairo Geniza grew from an idea to ongoing project, and what our researchers, developers and volunteers have learned along the way.
  • Different crowdsourcing platforms and projects share their approaches to project planning, development, and outreach.
  • And other Zooniverse projects teams, like Anti-Slavery Manuscripts, Galaxy Zoo, and Wildwatch Kenya, talking about their experiences in people-powered research.

We are so excited to learn from each other, and we invite you to be a part of the conversation! You can register for one or all of the conversations at https://genizalab.princeton.edu/crowdsourcing-and-the-humanities. Each conversation will be recorded and shared widely after the event.

As always, you can visit scribesofthecairogeniza.org and dive into one of our many workflows. Try your hand at sorting some fragments or transcribe away!

Thanks for your help, The Scribes of the Cairo Geniza Team

Cite this post: admin. “EVENT: Crowdsourcing and the Humanities: Roundtable Discussions Celebrating Scribes of the Cairo Geniza”. Published April 21, 2021. https://judaicadh.github.io//blog/2021-04-21-celebrating-scribes/. Accessed on .