< Back to News & Events

More Pembroke news

Access Week 2025: From Local to Global

Designed to emulate 'a week in the life of an Oxford undergraduate', Access Week is an annual summer residential at Pembroke College. Select pupils from our target regions who have participated in our Access and Outreach programmes were invited to attend the residential, which took place this summer. We welcomed 120 pupils who participated in tutorials, seminars, mock interviews, academic trips, and much more.

Read More

Reflections of a Recent Pembroke Graduate

Michaelmas term is fast approaching, which can only mean one thing – an onslaught of Freshers will be imminently arriving to Oxford and Pembroke. Starting university can be a big transition for anyone. We thought we’d ask one of our fresh graduates, Rohit Ghosh, to reflect on his time at Pembroke, looking all the way back to his own Freshers’ week.

Read More

Dr Victoria Van Hyning’s Research Collaboration in Crowdsourcing Receives $1.27 Million Grant

NEWS |

Crowdsourcing projects have become hugely popular over the last decade, yet there are few organisations who offer user-friendly, open-source and freely available platforms on which galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM), academics and amateur users can depend.

Dr Victoria Van Hyning, Junior Research Fellow and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Pembroke College and Humanities PI (Principal Investigator) of ‘Zooniverse’ (the international crowdsourcing organisation) led the grant proposal writing effort, successfully securing a significant grant of 1.27 million dollars from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to fund the 'Transforming Libraries and Archives through Crowdsourcing' project.

This research partnership between English and Astrophysics in Oxford, and the Adler Planetarium Library (Chicago), will expand the capacity for libraries and archives around the world to use crowdsourcing to advance audience engagement, improve access to their digital collections and develop humanities research through ‘Zooniverse’.

One of the main objectives is to create four bespoke GLAM ‘Zooniverse’ projects to explore methods of improving text and audio transcription and image annotation in the context of crowdsourcing tools—considering the research differences when transcribing in isolation or with the awareness of others’ transcription. Indeed, crowdsourcing research methods are often criticised for leading to inaccurate information. However, ‘Zooniverse’ combat this through their scientific, analytic approach to data; aggregating results and relying on the input of more than one user.

Amongst other valuable research outputs, this project will enable the development of templates in the ‘Project Builder’, which allow research teams to create their own crowdsourcing project. It is envisaged that this work will ensure that the GLAM community are better served in the future, by establishing which crowdsourcing tools and research data outputs would be most useful for opening up GLAM corpora.

More information about the proposed collaboration can be found here.

Featured Image by Arcaion, Creative Commons.