Tag Archives: Finland


Search me: what Mad Men and brave moles can do for historical records

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

Ever since we began helping the National Library of Finland correct mistakes in its old newspaper archive, I have noticed myself developing a slightly anti social interest in historical texts. I say ‘anti social’ because of its effect on conversation: what I have found is that while most people claim to be interested in history, the best way to get unwanted guests to leave your house after a dinner party is to start discussing the technical …

Tags: crowdsourcing Don Draper Downton Abbey google History Mad Men microtask National Library of Finland Ngram Optical character recognition

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HS Talkoot: Microtask to the rescue of Finnish media history

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… HS Talkoot.

Created for Helsingin Sanomat in collaboration with the National Library of Finland, the goal of HS Talkoot is to engage readers and allow them to help with the digital editing of old issues of Päivälehti, the predecessor of Helsingin Sanomat. The material in need of revision includes the whole first month of the historical newspaper (December 1889 – January 1890). All pages have been digitized in advance through automatic text recognition. Unfortunately, OCR …

Tags: Aamulehti crowd crowdsourcing Facebook Finland Finnish language Helsingin Sanomat microwork National Library of Finland Optical character recognition Päivälehti

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Crimes against content: is crowdsourcing to hamsters a bridge too far?

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In today’s world I’m not so sure.

My doubts began when I came across this article on a Chinese power-leveling site for popular MMOG RuneScape . The writer (or more likely the algorithm) has taken an original article about Microtask, sliced it up and loaded it with terms (“seers village”, “Port Khazard”, …

Tags: Boing Boing Cory Doctorow crowd crowdsourcing Facebook Gamification google Hamster microwork mmog National Library of Finland RuneScape Searching

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The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free)

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… As many of you will know, a few months ago Microtask and the National Library of Finland launched a project called Digitalkoot. Being the first Microtask-powered public service, Digitalkoot was a huge test for our crowdsourcing platform, the use of volunteers to complete microtasks, our ideas about gamification and rewards, and basically us as decent, upstanding citizens.

As we have already mentioned, with over 50,000 volunteers so far, the project has been a great …

Tags: Adobe Photoshop crowd crowdsourcing Finland Fiverr Los Angeles microwork music Photoshop Times Square United States

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For a fistful of dollars: the weird and wonderful world of Fiverr

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

Living in Finland it’s easy to become anesthetized to the real value of money. After a few years, prices that used to seem unbelievable become perfectly normal (“€6 for a piece of carrot cake, sure that sounds reasonable”). So until very recently, I’d have said that $5 was a pretty small sum. Then I discovered the amazing power of Fiverr.

Fiverr is an online community of users who offer to …

Tags: Adobe Photoshop crowd crowdsourcing Finland Fiverr Los Angeles microwork music Photoshop Times Square United States

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