The Subtitle-a-thon platform facilitates crowdsourcing initiatives which invite the public to create and add subtitles to archival audiovisual clips. This tool was developed by Noterik under the Europeana Generic Services project Europeana XX - Century of Change.
Subtitle-a-thons are sprint-like, onsite or online events which aim to make audiovisual material accessible to multilingual audiences and help audiovisual heritage to become more widely available. The Subtitle-a-thon platform helps people to set up and run a custom Subtitle-a-thon challenge. With a specialised audiovisual player developed in the Europeana CEF Telecom project Europeana Media, the platform allows anyone - including students, audiovisual enthusiasts, art and film lovers and educators - to add subtitles to selected audiovisual clips, offering a unique way to engage and explore cultural heritage collections. Where possible, the subtitles are also submitted upon validation to Europeana’s side for display.
The platform is currently only available in English.
The platform encourages lifelong learners, students and language enthusiasts to work directly with audiovisual archival content and European heritage.
Events using the platform motivate participants to improve and practice their language and subtitling skills.
The platform and events promote the call for more accessible audiovisual archival material for multilingual audiences and awareness of audiovisual online collections.
The platform consists of the Subtitle-a-thon website and an API that were both developed during the Europeana XX project. They are open sourced under the EUPL1.2 license. The Subtitle-a-thon website has been designed responsively and can be used across all major platforms and browsers. It allows importing of videos from public User Galleries from Europeana website through the User Sets API. After a subtitling campaign, the validated subtitles can be downloaded in WebVTT format.
To learn more and use the Subtitle-a-thon platform to create challenges, visit the website and contact the project partners at subtitles@euscreen.eu.
The Subtitle-a-thon platform is maintained by the EUscreen Foundation. The tool will be used in educational engagement activities of the CEF Telecom project Europeana Subtitled. Please note that the Subtitle-a-thon platform is currently in beta, new iterations and improvements will happen in the coming months under the EUscreen DSI4.