FromThePage is a digital scholarship tool which allows researchers and instructors to:
- Establish a digital space to transcribe primary source documents
- Export transcriptions for use in archival preservation or scholarly research
- Engage with local communities to produce high-quality translations
- Promote primary document literacy amongst the student body
- Coordinate volunteers from across the world to work on transcription projects
There are many potential applications for FromThePage, but it is primarily used to assist in teaching students to engage with primary source documents, and to assist researchers with generating transcriptions and other datasets for their humanities research.
Using FromThePage, instructors can assign documents to individual classes and create a collaborative space for students to learn how transcribe or translate primary source documents. This can be particularly useful for handwritten manuscripts or similar documents. Instructors can organize and assign documents or document sections to individual students by assigning access privileges, including restricting access to entire document sets to specific classes based on email address. Instructors can easily view and manage changes, comments, and edits to transcriptions and translations from their dashboard, to offer feedback and check work.
Researchers will find the tool useful in generating legible copies of primary source documents. Researchers can solicit and coordinate volunteers from across the world to assist in generating transcriptions and translations for documents they are working on. The Benson Latin American Library has already successfully coordinated large-scale transcription and translation projects with assistance from colleagues across the world, and using FromThePage researchers can create and proof high quality transcriptions and translations.
