HI Scribe - Gaming the Archives

HI Scribe accelerates the preservation of the important history of the Hawai'ian Islands by providing a fun and efficient tool for volunteers to transcribe Hawai'i State Archives documents.

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Inspiration

We need your help! The Public Archives of Hawai'i is the keeper of public memory. As such, we have millions of records that protect your rights, identity, property and history. But given the volume and varying record keeping practices of the past, these records are often difficult or time consuming to find. But with your help, we can make finding records a much easier and straightforward process.. Volunteer today to help us index these records and join us in connecting the People of Hawaiʻi with their past, their heritage and their culture!

Who Are We?

The Gaming the Archives Team is:

  • Chris Uyehara
  • Paul Wheeler
  • Ray Berger
  • Dominick Grigsby
  • Jonathan Zieg
  • Rob Shikina

What it does

The Hawaii State Archives has hundreds of thousands of records that protect identity, property, and history, but many of those records are locked in unindexed documents. Finding the document you need is like finding a needle in a haystack. But what if there was an app that made it fun and easy to index those paper documents? They by leveraging crowdsourcing we could have many of those records indexed and searchable online within days. That’s what our app does.

HI Scribe is a web site that allows employees of the Hawai'i State Archives (HSA) to create projects and upload documents. Volunteers can then transcribe those documents with a fun and efficient interface including Computer Vision powered automatic transcription. Trained volunteers can then review and approve the transcriptions, with any discrepancies or issues automatically brought to the reviewers attention. And finally HSA employees can download the transcribed data for indexing and use in other HSA tools and sites.

How I built it

HI Scribe is a Single Page Application built in Angular with an ASP.Net REST API backend with data stored in PostgreSQL. Computer Vision components are implemented using Azure Cognitive Services.

Challenges I ran into

Lack of sleep. Delegating things.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The incredible amount of stuff that actually works. The team's ability and willingness to pitch in wherever they could. The totally game changing auto transcription functionality which has the potential to massively accelerate the transcription process.

What's next for HI Scribe - Gaming the Archives

There's still a lot of functionality to add around gamification and to make this project something that volunteers can start using on real projects.

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