What software can be used to crowdsource a transcription?

April 16, 2013 5:55 PM

I am looking for an online service in which a group of volunteers could use to transcribe an audio or video file into text. Is there anything that will allow 10-15 volunteers to simultaneously log in and do this?

I am familiar with services like CastingWords and others that allow you to pay to have people transcribe software, but I'm curious if anything exists for volunteers to contribute to a project.

posted by perpetualstroll to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: dotsub allows you to do this, and I believe it's free.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:02 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Pronoiac has been setting up instances of Fanscribed to transcribe the Metafilter Podcast. Here's the latest one. It splits the audio into 30 second chunks, and divvies them up among the volunteers, which seems to work pretty well from a user perspective. It looks like it's a bit more involved on the admin side, though.
posted by yuwtze at 6:56 PM on April 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

Oh hi! I was beaten to it! Yes, I run the podcast transcriptions. Fanscribed works great on the user side. On the admin side, it definitely takes some work to set up the first time, and you can't add new episodes from the web yet. I think its creator is open to extending it. Let me know if you have any questions.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:07 AM on April 17, 2013