Centering Humans in AI-enabled Manuscript Transcription

How can artificial intelligence be used to support humans instead of replacing them? This presentation demonstrates how we integrated Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) into the FromThePage crowdsourcing platform while keeping humans central to the transcription process.

We asked ourselves how can we introduce enough friction into our user interface that volunteers have to think rather than blindly trusting machine generated data, while still using AI to speed up their work and increase their pleasure? Our focus lay on enhancing user experience rather than on character error rates or model training.

We will discuss design considerations, implementation specifics, and the initial outcomes of user testing conducted by the State Library of New South Wales and their Digital Volunteer working group.