Bullinger digital

Context

As part of the "Bullinger digital" digitization project on the correspondence of Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), a correction campaign was launched as a Citizen Science project.

About the project

The aim of the campaign was to transfer relevant information for each letter into a database with the help of interested citizens. The "Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies" had gathered this information over several decades on more than 10,000 index cards, which were filled out both by typewriter and by hand. While the typewritten entries could be automatically recognized via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and inserted (with a small error rate) into the corresponding database fields, the handwritten entries had to be entered into the database manually. This is where the Citizen Science project came in: Via the Internet dedicated volunteers corrected the automatically created entries as well as added the manual entries.

Results and lessons learnt

Within half a year, it was thus possible to create a correct database entry for each index card (and thus for each document of the Bullinger correspondence from 1548 onwards). In this way, the citizens involved have made a valuable contribution to the development of a resource that enables research in theology, history, linguistics and beyond.