La Sfera Challenge Project 1st Edition (September 2020

In an effort to confront the social isolation imposed by the global pandemic, this project created limited-term transcription teams to transcribe a different digitized IIIF-compliant manuscript copy of Goro Dati’s La Sfera, a short fifteenth-century text often written in a neat humanist hand and found in manuscript versions in several world-wide repositories. The transcription teams competed to determine which group could transcribe its version of the text most accurately, quickly, and cooperatively. The goals and results of the competition were threefold: 1. to introduce project participants to IIIF and the FromThePage transcription platform, 2. to advertise this methodology to the larger community of scholars who work with manuscripts and 3. to demonstrate how transcribed texts, once complete, may be manipulated in the digital environment.