Crowdscribing
I mentioned in my last post that I was looking for volunteers to help transcribe the video of my talk at Fronteers 2010. I didn’t get much of a response so I put the word out on Twitter. Then I got plenty of offers.
I owe a pint to these people:
- Jon Linklater-Johnson
- Jason Fry
- Matthias Reuter
- Richie Coss
- Jennifer Hageman
- Matthew Loseke
- Danielle Huntrods
- Ian Lunn
You can see the results of their work here: The Design Of HTML5. Each volunteer transcribed about ten minutes of the talk, which equates to about an hour’s work.
As it turned out, the Fronteers folks had commissioned a transcription from Casting Words, the service built on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You can see the result—not bad. I’ve used Casting Words in the past to get transcriptions done although lately I’ve found they take far too long for somewhat inconsistent results.
I think that, for the best results, you can’t beat hiring a professional transcriber. But, in lieu of that, I think the aforementioned volunteers did a great job, for which I am very grateful.
Incidentally, the talk—The Design Of HTML5—is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution licence so if you want to republish it or adapt it, please go ahead.