On January 9, 2024, The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced it was awarding $33.8 million in grants for 260 humanities projects across the country. NEH is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.

Heather Froehlich, (inset), University Libraries Digital Scholarship Assistant Specialist in Research Engagement, serves on the advisory board of one of those 260 projects. “Scoping Scalable Sustainable DH Infrastructure for Online Crowdsourcing" received a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. 

The project is being coordinated through Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — more than a million people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers.

“When people participate in crowd-sourced transcription activities, someone has to put all the output data together and package it up for the institution hosting the images,” Froehlich said. "We usually aim to get three readers and transcribers per page, so we can have a majority rules situation. Even still, someone has to come by and decide what the "best" reading of each page is. This NEH project will support a big code and process review to make this whole process easier." 

Original press release: Zooniverse Receives NEH Grant to Evaluate Transcription Tools – Daily Zooniverse