The influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourcing manuscript transcription: An empirical investigation of the Transcribe-Sheng project
Aslib Journal of Information Management
ISSN: 2050-3806
Article publication date: 7 January 2020
Issue publication date: 20 April 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how social value orientation and domain knowledge affect cooperation levels and transcription quality in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, and contribute to the recruitment of participants in such projects in practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a quasi-experiment using Transcribe-Sheng, which is a well-known crowdsourced manuscript transcription project in China, to investigate the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge. The experiment lasted one month and involved 60 participants. ANOVA was used to test the research hypotheses. Moreover, inverviews and thematic analyses were conducted to analyze the qualitative data in order to provide additional insights.
Findings
The analysis confirmed that in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, social value orientation has a significant effect on participants’ cooperation level and transcription quality; domain knowledge has a significant effect on participants’ transcription quality, but not on their cooperation level. The results also reveal the interactive effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge on cooperation levels and quality of transcription. The analysis of the qualitative data illustrated the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourced manuscript transcription in detail.
Originality/value
Researchers have paid little attention to the impacts of the psychological and cognitive factors on crowdsourced manuscript transcription. This study investigated the effect of social value orientation and the combined effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge in this context. The findings shed light on crowdsourcing transcription initiatives in the cultural heritage domain and can be used to facilitate participant selection in such projects.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insightful comments, which helped to improve the article. The authors are also grateful for all the comments and suggestions on the poster in ASIS&T 2019, which presents the preliminary idea of this study. Furthermore, the authors are indebted to the Shanghai Library for providing the crowdsourcing platform and valuable effort on this work. This work was jointly supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 71774083), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 30919011104) and the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation of China (15ZDB126).
Citation
Zhang, X., Chen, S., Zhao, Y.C., Song, S. and Zhu, Q. (2020), "The influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourcing manuscript transcription: An empirical investigation of the Transcribe-Sheng project", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 72 No. 2, pp. 219-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2019-0221
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited