Announcing ROLL THE CREDITS: Classifying and Transcribing Text with Zooniverse

Today we’re launching ROLL THE CREDITS, a new Zooniverse project to engage the public in helping us catalog unseen content in the AAPB archive. Zooniverse is the “world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.” Zooniverse volunteers (like you!) are helping the AAPB in classifying and transcribing the text from extracted frames of uncataloged public television programs, providing us with information we can plug directly into our catalog, closing the gap on our sparsely described collection of nearly 50,000 hours of television and radio.

Example frame from ROLL THE CREDITS

The American people have made a huge investment in public radio and television over many decades. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) works to ensure that this rich source for American political, social, and cultural history and creativity is saved and made available once again to future generations.

The improved catalog records will have verified titles, dates, credits, and copyright statements. With the updated, verified information we will be able to make informed decisions about the development of our archive, as well as provide access to corrected versions of transcripts available for anyone to search free of charge at americanarchive.org.

In conjunction with our speech-to-text transcripts from FIX IT, a game that asks users to correct and validate the transcripts one phrase at a time, ROLL THE CREDITS helps us fulfill our mission of preserving and making accessible historic content created by the public media, saving at-risk media before the contents are lost to prosperity.

Thanks for supporting AAPB’s mission! Know someone who might be interested? Feel free to share with the other transcribers and public media fans in your life!