Dr Victoria Van Hyning and Crowdsourcing Platform Zooniverse Feature in The New Yorker

Dr Victoria Van Hyning, Junior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Pembroke, has been interviewed by The New Yorker as part of their recent review of a new project called Shakespeare’s World. The project has been launched on Zooniverse and seeks to transcribe handwritten documents from Shakespeare’s contemporaries to enable us to better understand the life and times of this period.

Dr Van Hyning is the Humanities Principal Investigator for Zooniverse,  the world’s leading academic crowdsourcing organisation.  She also played a significant role in the foundation of the organisation.

As the New Yorker article reports, ‘The idea [of Zooniverse] arose in 2013, when Chris Lintott, Zooniverse’s founder and an astronomer at the University of Oxford, asked his friend Victoria Van Hyning, a scholar of English literature, what she considered the most pressing problem in the humanities… She said… “It’s definitely text transcription”.’ As Dr Van Hyning explained to the New Yorker, ‘researchers have amassed enormous collections of old handwritten documents, but lack the time and resources to transcribe them all.’

The New Yorker article draws attention to the innovative nature of Shakespeare’s World, which asks volunteers to contribute to transcriptions of letters and recipes of the period. The article also highlights the significant impact Zooniverse has had over the last several years: ‘around 2500 Zooniverse users have completed more than 3300 pages.’

Read the full article here.