Word-Hunter: A Gamesourcing Experience to Validate the Transcription of Historical Manuscripts

Nowadays, there are still many handwritten historical documents in archives waiting to be transcribed and indexed. Since manual transcription is tedious and time consuming, the automatic transcription seems the path to follow. However, the performance of current handwriting recognition techniques is not perfect, so a manual validation is mandatory. Crowdsourcing is a good strategy for manual validation, however it is a tedious task. In this paper we analyze experiences based in gamification in order to propose and design a gamesourcing framework that increases the interest of users. Then, we describe and analyze our experience when validating the automatic transcription using the gamesourcing application. Moreover, thanks to the combination of clustering and handwriting recognition techniques, we can speed up the validation while maintaining the performance.