Cracking the Astrid Lindgren Code: A Showcase of a Librarian-Researcher-Crowdsourcing Collaboration

Abstract

In this poster, the research project the Astrid Lindgren Code is used to showcase how libraries can play an active role in facilitating connections and infrastructure for researchers and the public to create fruitful citizen science projects.

In the Astrid Lindgren Code, expert crowdsourcing has been used to transliterate a selection of the shorthand manuscripts of the world-famous author. The crowd's expertise in stenography has been crucial for the project's success and the results will be used to study Lindgren's writing process as well as to train an HTR (hand-written text recognition) model for shorthand which will enable easier access to the other Lindgren manuscripts as well as other collections written in shorthand.

The poster will especially highlight the role librarians played in setting up a transcription platform, educating the crowd in using it, and the iterative process between librarian-researcher-crowd which can be a model for libraries in future similar endeavours.