Scripto

Scripto opens up the possibilities of community-sourced transcription, translation, or description for digital humanities projects in universities, libraries, archives, and museums. With easy-to-implement extensions for the Omeka Classic and Omeka S, Scripto allows administrators for any project to now enlist a community of enthusiasts to participate in this aspect of cultural heritage work.

What is Scripto?

Scripto is an open-source tool that permits registered users to view digital files and transcribe them with an easy-to-use toolbar, rendering that text searchable. The tool includes a versioning history and editorial controls to make public contributions more manageable, and supports the transcription of a wide range of file types (both images and documents).

There are two versions of Scripto, each of which works with a different version of Omeka. Scripto for Omeka Classic creates a single transcription project for the content of your Omeka Classic site. Scripto for Omeka S enables the creation of multiple projects built from shared items in your Omeka S installation.

Project History

Developed at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the original Scripto project was supported by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the National Archives and Records Administration’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Scripto for Omeka S was made possible by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2017.

For ideas on how to guide transcribers when using Scripto, explore the transcribers’ guides at the Papers of the War Department. You might also look at other sites using Scripto; to find them, search the Omeka Classic and Omeka S site directories for “Scripto”.

Sample Transcription Guidelines

Each Scripto project requires guidelines or a style manual specific to the kinds of materials in the database. Your style manual takes into account the historic era of the materials, language and speech mannerisms, quality of the raw materials, whether wiki markup is needed to reproduce original formatting, and the desired outcome of the project. For example, should transcriptions maintains spelling and speech exactly as represented in the materials or is the focus on content and substance alone, regardless of stylistic idiosyncrasies? How will written transcriptions represent non-standard speech patterns or accents?

The following sample is presented as broad guidelines, as suggestions guiding your development of project-relevant style manuals. If the kinds of materials you are working with are varied, you may want to consider separate directions for text, audio, and multimedia items.

View sample guidelines