I don't think the software yet exists, but this is my fantasy: a wiki-translation of OE poetry. This is how it would work: a site would be loaded with a base translation, mine or someone else's who wants to volunteer. Then the community of users could correct, improve, and refine the translation. The wiki-munity would reject wacky or incorrect changes and endorse the best ones by hive intelligence.
If you're skeptical of group think, check out this fantastic podcast by Radiolab on how order can emerge without leaders or centralized planning:
Radio Lab: Emergence.
Question for digital humanities folk: would new software be necessary for such a wiki or could wikipedia itself be used as a platform?
I think you could use Wikipedia itself, but that would be quite tricky to control, I think. I'm using Scripto on my Gower transcription site (confessioamantis.org) and it works very nicely and seems very robust. It's basically a MediaWiki setup that has plugins for a variety of platforms, such as WordPress. You can find out more at scripto.org and also see a few examples of what works. It's quite easy to set up and I'm happy to share my limited experience if you want to move this forward. It's a great idea! The big challenge is to get a good range of people involved as regular contributors, but that is part of the fun, I think. Best, Malte
ReplyDeleteThanks, Malte, for the reference to scripto. It looks extremely promising. I'm going to go out there and educate myself on the possibilities and then get back to you with some (I hope) intelligent questions. It would be fantastic if we could crowd source some translations.
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Everyone, be sure to check out the homepage for the Gower Project: http://www.gowerproject.org/
As well as Malte's site, "Crowd Sourcing John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'": http://confessioamantis.org/