Poster presented at Linked Pasts 2020
For more details, please see the extended abstract “Crowdsourcing the historical record: knowledge base construction for Chinese history at scale” presented at Taiwan’s DADH 2020 conference.
Abstract
The tasks of semantically annotating historical primary source materials and systematically recording knowledge about historical entities have closely connected conceptual relationships. Annotations can be leveraged to extract knowledge about entities, and knowledge about entities can be leveraged to aid in the efficient annotation of texts. Both tasks also rely in practice upon accurate transcriptions of primary source materials, which – like annotations and structured knowledge – are costly to produce in the first instance. This poster describes a crowdsourced approach in which all three tasks are carried out in parallel, involving not only the distributed transcription of texts, but also the creation of a knowledge base continually expanded through user contributions made partly through annotation, immediately and automatically contributing to improved automated assistance with ongoing and future crowdsourced annotation.