Over four years of project planning and development, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza has grown from an idea into an ongoing initiative. In this session, the PIs and project managers talk about how the Scribes team developed to support the project. What were its initial goals? How did they change? What worked and what didn’t? What were the unexpected takeaways?

• Moderator: Jim Casey, Penn State University
• Laurie Allen, Library of Congress
• Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
• Laura Newman Eckstein, University of Pennsylvania
• Emily Esten, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
• Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab

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Letting the public ask and take charge of questions can inspire new avenues for conversation. It has been one of our favorite parts about Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. When falling into Geniza fragments, these volunteers found a passion for this work. What did they learn? What do we learn from the experience of working with people in research?

• Moderator: Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab
• Matthew Dudley (PhD student, Yale University)
• Abigail Glickman (Undergraduate, Princeton University)
• Grace Masback (Undergraduate, Princeton University)
• Steffy Reader (Zooniverse volunteer)
• Rachel Richman (PhD student, Princeton University, and Project Manager, Princeton Geniza Project)

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Crowdsourcing projects have the ability to engage everyday citizens with humanities and science research in order to create a more active and informed public. How have people engaged in crowdsourcing within our project, the Zooniverse platform, and on similar platforms? There are so many platforms for engaging the public in making collections accessible. How do different crowdsourcing platforms approach project planning, development, and community engagement? 

• Moderator: Natalia Ermolaev, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University
• Jim Casey, Courtney Murray, and Justin Smith, Colored Conventions Project and Douglas Day at the Penn State Center for Black Digital Research
• Emily Esten, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
• Caitlin Haynes, Smithsonian Transcription Center 
• Mia Ridge, Living with Machines 

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Processes and deliverables for digital projects must meet the needs of both researchers and audiences. In this conversation, we talk with developers, designers, and technical leads on crowdsourcing projects. The more resources go into a project, and the more it speaks to a particular set of research questions, does it become more difficult to sustain? Where is the sweet spot between specificity and sustainability?

• Moderator: Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University
• Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
• Ben Brumfield, FromThePage
• Will Granger, LogicGate
• Shaun Noordin, Zooniverse/Oxford University
• Becky Rother, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium

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Project sustainability connects to the tools, resources, and opportunities for use and reuse of data. In this conversation, we hear from scholars in the communities that form around crowdsourced data. How can research projects use crowdsourced transcription data to suit their needs? How are scholars reusing data from open-access projects to create new and exciting ways of interacting with knowledge?

• Moderator: Will Noel, Princeton University Library
• Ryan Cordell, Viral Texts
• Daniel Stoekl Ben-Ezra, eScriptorium
• Victoria Van Hyning, The David C. Driskell Papers Project
• Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab

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The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. From astrophysicists looking for galaxies to botanists understanding climate change, these project teams result in new discoveries and datasets. What are the unexpected commonalities and differences in these projects? How does working with volunteers sustain and grow the heart of the research question? 

• Moderator: Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
• Tom Blake, Anti-Slavery Manuscript Projects
• Emily Esten, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
• Brooke Simmons, Galaxy Zoo & the Planetary Response Network
• Jenna Stacy-Dawes, Wildwatch Kenya

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Laurie Allen is a Program Analyst in the Digital Strategy Directorate at the Library of Congress. She joined the Library in 2019, after working for nearly 20 years in academic libraries. Most recently, she served as the Director of Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, where she was a PI on Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. Her background working in digital library contexts and library administration help her work alongside her colleagues in implementing the Library’s Digital Strategy. Laurie has a Masters in LIS from Simmons College. When she’s not working, Laurie is a lifelong and devoted Philadelphian.

Tom Blake is the Content Discovery Manager at Boston Public Library, where he managed the Anti-Slavery Manuscripts project through its completion. He has been involved with the development and sustenance of the Boston Public Library’s digitization programs for over 15 years. As their Digital Projects Manager, Tom expanded the Library’s digitization services into a statewide initiative. This program includes digitized collections from almost 500 different organizations across Massachusetts that help fuel online engagement for students, educators, lifelong learners, researchers, and the generally curious. 

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Samantha Blickhan is the Humanities Lead for Zooniverse and Co-Director of the Zooniverse team at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. Her duties include guiding the strategic vision for Zooniverse Humanities efforts and managing development of new tools and resources, which have been supported by funding from the IMLS, NEH, NSF, ACLS, and AHRC. She is currently co-I of the Collective Wisdom project, which will produce an authoritative book on the ‘state of the art’ in cultural heritage crowdsourcing in 2021.

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Ben Brumfield founded the cultural heritage crowdsourcing platform FromThePage in 2005 and has been covering developments within crowdsourced manuscript transcription since 2007. Institutions like Stanford University Archives and the British Library have used the system to collaborate with volunteer communities to transform scanned historic documents into machine-readable, human-accessible electronic texts.  Over the past decade, FromThePage has been used by libraries, archives, and museums to transcribe material ranging from Arabic scientific manuscripts to Aztec codices. 

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Jim Casey is an assistant professor of African American Studies and the managing director of the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Delaware and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University. With P. Gabrielle Foreman, he is co-editor of The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press 2021). Among other projects, he is co-founder and co-director of the Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day, with awards and support from the MLA, ASA, NEH, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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Ryan Cordell is Associate Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently serves as the English Department’s Graduate Program Director. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, history, and computer science on the NEH- and ACLS-funded Viral Texts project, which is using robust data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals.

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Matthew Dudley is a PhD candidate at Yale University writing a dissertation on the Jewish communities of Egypt and the broader Mediterranean worlds of the 18th and 19th centuries based on Geniza documents in Arabic, Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic.

Laura Newman Eckstein is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her studies focus on Jews in the early Atlantic world (17th-19th centuries) with specific interests in trade networks, material culture, and digital humanities methodologies. Prior to her doctoral studies, Laura worked as the Judaica Digital Humanities Coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, where she served as project manager of Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. Laura holds a bachelor's degree with the highest honors in religion from Haverford College. Laura's senior thesis at Haverford focused on Jewish peddlers, their business networks, and their religious practices along the Lower Mississippi River between 1820-1865. 

Natalia Ermolaev is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University She has a PhD Slavic languages and literatures, and her research interests include Russian émigré writing, periodical studies, digital libraries and archives. She is active in promoting digital humanities in the Slavic Studies field, especially through Princeton’s Slavic Digital Humanities Working Group.

Emily Esten is the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica Curator of Digital Humanities. As the inaugural Kaplan Curator, Emily Esten spearheads projects that facilitate access to and use of Penn's Judaica collections, promoting them and making connections between them and dispersed Judaica content around the globe. In addition, she is the project manager of Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. She  holds a BA in history and digital humanities from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a MA in public humanities from Brown University.

Abigail Glickman is an undergraduate at Princeton University and a researcher at the Princeton Geniza Lab.

Will Granger was a frontend developer with the Zooniverse, working extensively on Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. He is now a software engineer at LogicGate.

Caitlin Haynes is the Program Coordinator for the Smithsonian Transcription Center, where she oversees the program's digital volunteer community, outreach and communications, technical development, and pan-institutional collaborations. An archivist by training, Caitlin holds an MA in United States History (specializing in the American South), and an MLIS in Archives and Records Management from the University of Maryland, College Park; as well as a BA in Anthropology and History from Emory University. 

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Rebecca Sutton Koeser is the Lead Developer at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton (CDH). Rebecca manages the Development & Design Team to design and build custom software for CDH research partnership projects. She is currently Co-PI with Marina Rustow and Technical Lead on the Princeton Geniza Project research partnership. Rebecca’s current research interests include experiments with data physicalizations, modeling and visualizing data structures in accessible ways, and critical perspectives on Agile software development. Rebecca has training in both English Literature and Computer Science, and many years of experience with software development in an academic environment.

Grace Masback is an undergraduate at Princeton University writing her senior thesis on merchant letters from the early 18th century in Ladino, Spanish, and Italian involving an interconnected group of Jewish traders across the Mediterranean whose base was Cairo.

Courtney Murray is a PhD student in the Department of English at Penn State University and joined the Douglass Day team in 2019. Courtney became a Center Scholar for the Center for Black Digital Research when it launched at Penn State. As a CBDR Center Scholar, she has continued working with Douglass Day as the managing editor of the Douglass Day newsletter and a member of the Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program recruitment team. Her research areas include African diasporic literature and theory on slavery, memory, archives, and resistance.

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Will Noel is the inaugural John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University Library (PUL). Previously, Noel worked at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries where he has been Associate Vice Provost for External Partnerships, Director of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. At Penn, he played an active role in supporting and engaging Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.

Shaun Noordin is a Zooniverse web developer in Oxford who writes code for fun and solves puzzles for a living.

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Steffy Reader is a committed volunteer at Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.

Rachel Richman is a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, researching a dissertation on women's labor and property ownership in the 11th and 12th century Geniza corpus.

Mia Ridge is the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. A core member of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, she enables innovative research based on digital collections. She leads large- and small-scale projects, providing guidance and training on computational methods for historical collections. Currently a Co-Investigator on Living with Machines, an AHRC and UKRI-funded project integrating data science, historical research and digitised collections, she was a key contributor to the original project proposal, ensuring a lasting legacy for the heritage sector. She leads the project’s ‘Communities’ Lab, integrating crowdsourcing and public engagement with academic practices and AI, looking ahead to the emerging field of ‘human computation’.

Becky Rother is the lead designer for Zooniverse, based in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. In this role, she works with research teams to create bespoke projects suited to a specific research goal and leads design efforts on the zooniverse.org and mobile app platforms. She brings 10 years of experience in visual, product, and UX design, and has previously worked with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies to create memorable identities and interactive experiences.

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Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University, and a specialist in the documentary Geniza. She is director of the Princeton Geniza Lab and serves as an academic consultant on Scribes of the Cairo Geniza.  

Brooke Simmons is a Lecturer in Physics at Lancaster University. She is also the Deputy Project Scientist for Galaxy Zoo and Principal Investigator of Galaxy Zoo Bar Lengths and The Planetary Response Network. As part of the Zooniverse team and the founder of the Zooniverse Analysis and Zooniverse Transient Groups, she has helped design, run, and produce science from citizen science projects, and have done research into the practice of crowdsourcing and its use in change detection and human-machine classification.

Justin Smith is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in English and African American studies at The Pennsylvania State University and joined the Douglass Day team in 2019. Justin became an inaugural Scholar for the Center for Black Digital Research when it launched at Penn State, continuing his work with Douglass Day and transcriptions. His research areas include early twentieth-century African American literature, Critical Race Theory, the Black Radical Tradition, and Digital Humanities.

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Jenna Stacy-Dawes serves San Diego Zoo Global as a Researcher in Population Sustainability, and project coordinator for Wildwatch Kenya. With her background in community-based conservation, spatial ecology, and geographic information systems, she is helping develop study methods for monitoring giraffe populations in northern Kenya. Jenna earned her bachelor’s degree in Zoology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, her master’s degree in Biology through the University of Miami’s Advanced Inquiry Program, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Environmental Geographic Information Science through Unity College.

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Daniel Stoekl Ben-Ezra is Directeur d'Etudes at the EPHE-PSL (École pratique des hautes études at Paris-Sciences-Lettres University), where he has worked since 2011. Most of his research deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Rabbinics with a strong input from digital and computational humanities. He is co-director of the open source VRE (virtual research environment) eScriptorium for automatic and manual analysis and transcription of handwritten documents, which the Princeton Geniza Lab team is currently using for automatic transcription of documentary geniza fragments.

Victoria Van Hyning is an assistant professor of Library Innovation at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park where teaches subjects related to archives, crowdsourcing, librarianship, outreach, engagement, inclusivity, and design. She joined in 2020 after two years at the Library of Congress where she worked on the team to design and launch the crowdsourcing transcription project By the People (crowd.loc.gov). Before that, she worked with Zooniverse.org in Oxford as Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-2015) and Humanities PI (2015-2018), and led the development of several humanities projects including AnnoTate, Shakespeare’s World, Science Gossip, and a successful bid to the IMLS for “Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing.” In February 2021 she launched The David C. Driskell Papers Project, built by her library science students as part of her new course “Outreach, Inclusion, and Crowdsourcing” in Fall 2020. The goal of these projects is to create data for research, to improve cultural heritage search systems, and engage a diverse user base with history.

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