Research, teaching and crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing and annotation projects for digitised material have been around for many years. However, the potential of this for research, teaching and public engagement, is only now starting to be realised as digital infrastructure and standards reach greater maturity resulting in an explosion of new possibilities.
At Digirati this has presented one of our biggest recent challenges in terms of product design. How do we build a product that can deliver the broad range of powerful new features and flexibility required by emerging use cases and practices? How do we balance ease-of-use for public engagement with more complex academic workflows?
The answer has been to build a platform that has configurability and extensibility at its core. So while end users encounter a clean easy-to-use expression of the platform tailored to their work, administrators and developers can customise the same product across a wide range of use cases.
This platform, called Madoc, can be used purely for enriching content with data to be utilised in some other system or additionally as a destination for showcasing the resulting enriched collections. By using structured and linked data models, including existing controlled vocabularies, a much more accurate data representation can be achieved facilitating more advanced research, teaching or discovery use cases.
Madoc is built using the International Image Interoperability (IIIF) standard from the ground up, both using and pushing the IIIF standards, contributing to and benefiting from IIIF compliant tooling from this thriving community.
It has taken a number of iterations to get this right, but thanks to the ongoing commitment of our team, and not to mention our customers, we have created what we believe is the most powerful and flexible crowdsourcing and annotation platform currently available, ready for the use cases of the future!
