I've not heard of others doing this, but I use wikis for lots of scratch collaboration projects. So in principle, this is a reasonable way to work informally among a small group on a first pass.
My main caveat about this is that this is probably only suitable for a first pass at character capture rather than any serious editorial work, and even then it might prove problematic. The main problem is that there is no way of automatically enforcing a policy on what is to be captured or how these details are to be recorded: if you have multiple people working on a project, and you have no control over what they enter, they will invariably diverge in practice: one scholar might expand abbreviations, another prefer to leave them unexpanded; one might record multiple options for reading difficult passages, another just choose the most likely, and yet others use different symbols for indicating uncertainty. Same is true of damage or codicological features: one scholar might want to record information about the damage down in lines 38 or so and ff.; another might just transcribe around the cut and damage.
A solution around this might be to insist that encoders use something like the Leiden system of diplomatic transcription symbols although you won't have anyway of enforcing correct use.
XML and XML tools like the OxygenXML editor are designed precisely to give you this kind of control. There was a time when they could seem quite intimidating. Nowadays, however, they are becoming ever more user friendly. So one, slightly more formal way, of setting a project up so that more than one person could transcribe texts might be to ask everybody to get a copy of something like OxygenXML (although in principle, it wouldn't matter what editor they used), and then store their common transcriptions online in a version control repository like subversion. People would work on transcriptions on their home computers and then log the files back into the common repository when they were finished. Subversion logs changes and lets more than one person work on the same file at the same time. And you can show the world what you are doing by also publishing the repository (this is how Digital Medievalist works, in fact: we have a subversion repository with all the XML files. This repository is copied to a non-public website (so we can check our work) once every minute or two and then to the public site once a day. Individual editors download files to edit from the central repository).
The above assumes that your plan is to have a group of previously identified editors work on the same project (negotiated collaboration). If your goal instead is crowd sourcing (i.e. just putting MS images and or transcriptions up and letting anybody transcribe or edit them, then you'll need some other solution. But planning that depends on what you see the goal of the project as: if it is really just to get the text out of the manuscript photos and into unicode characters, then a wiki might work--but I'd say ask people only to record the letters in front of them, perhaps making a policy of expanding abbreviations, and not to record any paleographic features, uncertainty, etc. Other solutions might depend on what you want to crowd source. For example, if you have an XML encoded document that you are displaying on the web, it could be possible to code the page so that people could click on a word they want to correct, and then get the content of the word (but not the tags) displayed to them in a little form window for correction. And then you could go up to much more heavily programmed solutions.
Bottom line: a wiki is a good informal way of sharing work (with loss of policy control) or for crowdsourcing very simple questions (are these the right letters? what letters does this image contain?). But for really encoding expert knowledge or doing anything complicated with the text at all, you are going to want to use XML. There are very robust ways of doing that in a distributed fashion.
Buckner wrote:
Hello,
I am thinking about setting up a wiki for the purposes of transcribing medieval manuscripts. One such experiment is here
http://www.mywikibiz.com/User:Ockham/sandbox
Has anyone here heard of a similar project? The advantages of wikis is that many people can work on them, increasing the accuracy of the transcription, and there is an audit trail in case changes need to be reviewed or reversed.
Edward Buckner
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