Victoria Van Hyning: Crowdsourcing and Humanities Research

Is crowdsourcing a viable tool for literary historians and critics to use in their research? How might the fruits of crowdsourced projects be used for both close and ‘distant’ reading in the humanities? This talk will provide an overview of ‘Shakespeare’s World’: a collaboration between the world-leading academic crowdsourcing group called Zooniverse.org (Oxford) the Folger Shakespeare Library which heads up the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project, and the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Shakespeare’s World’ invites members of the public to transcribe manuscript material from the Folger collection. The outcomes will be incorporated into the Folger catalogue, and be made freely available for research. This talk will provide some early findings and visualizations of the resulting data.

Dr Victoria Van Hyning completed her doctoral work at the University of Sheffield, in the department of English Language and Literature, where she held a British Library co-doctoral award. Her work focused on English nuns in exile between 1550 and 1800, and their literary activities. Shortly after completing her doctoral studies she began work at Zooniverse, in Oxford, as the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, and led the development of AnnoTate (with Tate Britain), Science Gossip (with the Biodiversity Heritage Library) and ‘Shakespeare’s World’. She now holds a three year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the English Faculty at Oxford, is the Humanities PI of Zooniverse, and a JRF at Pembroke College.