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Deborah McDowell>>: The idea for a transcribe-a-thon, I must confess, came from information about
an earlier transcribe-a-thon sponsored by the Smithsonian organization, and once seeing
that, well what a wonderful, efficient way for us to dive in to this mass of papers and
begin to re-acquaint ourselves with Julian Bond.
To our great surprise, the impact of the transcribe-a-thon itself we felt immediately--largely through
reports from people who participated.
What they reported to us was a sense of deep fulfillment at being engaged with these materials,
that they felt they were doing more than simply transcribing words from a page into a computer.
But they were actually engaged with this figure whose words, dating back in many cases decades
before, still retained their relevance, their resonance, and their importance.
For the Carter G. Woodson Institute, it's been wonderful for that part of our mission
that is connected to public outreach.
That we were enabled to undertake a project that involved us so directly with the community
was quite wonderful for us, as a fulfillment of our lifelong mission to have whatever we
do have relevance for, implications for, the broader public.
Anyone with a mass of materials awaiting transcription or digitization has this as a possibility.
I think the others especially interested in the parts of this that are highly democratic--we
don't think typically about ordinary citizens participating in the life and development
of academic scholarship.
With this transcribe-a-thon, we kind of demystify -- or certainly hope we were demystifying
-- the process of engaging in academic scholarship, what it means to do academic scholarship.
Curtis Small>> Colored conventions meetings happened all over North America, and this
is why the records of those meetings have been found in archives all over the United
States, and in other countries as well.
This is also why we've been so committed to drawing in contributors and partners from
many places--because we depend on them to submit previously unavailable minutes and
other documents we can add to our database.
Well, you could say our project follows in the archival footsteps of the colored conventions
movement.
Denise Burgher: Absolutely agree with that, Curtis.
As you well know, one of the core principles of the Colored Conventions Project is to mirror
the spirit, the organizing structure, and the focus of the actual original colored conventions
themselves.
When we had our first public-facing initiative, which was to crowdsource transcribing our
archives, we got in contact with African American churches, where the original conventions had
been held.
It was important to us to make sure that current congregations had an opportunity to not only
interact with this history, but to be participants in making it present and relevant to this
current generation.
So, as a consequence, we had hundreds of African American church members transcribing 19th-century
texts.
It was a wonderful experience.
Patrick A. Lewis>> The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition seeks
research audiences as diverse as the historical people whose lives it documents.
Housed within a state historical agency, the project takes seriously its engagement with
researchers, students, and history enthusiasts, wherever they are, within or outside of Kentucky.
Civil War Governors has also included emerging scholars in the work of the project itself,
recruiting graduate students in U.S. history programs across the country to contribute
research and build new nodes on our historical social network.
Through that collaborative work, the students gain insight into the funding and administration
of the types of large-scale research projects which they might establish and lead later
in their careers.
Through K-12 lesson plans, social media, outreach, and in-person programming for family and local
history groups, Civil War Governors embraces its open accessibility to welcome new learners
into the same universe of historical documents and historical individuals that its scholarly
users investigate.
Thomas P. Slaughter>> We noticed when we spoke off-campus to groups of senior citizens that
they were both utterly fascinated by the project, by the family letters themselves, by the discussion
of the 19th century, and that when we projected the digital images up onto a screen, they
were extremely facile in being able to read the 19th-century cursive handwriting.
This is something that the students have always struggled a bit with, because they didn't
learn as much about cursive handwriting themselves in school.
And we also noticed that the senior citizens had a vocabulary that stretched to 19th-century
usages of terms in the ways that, again, challenged the students.
So, it occurred to us that maybe if you brought together the students--who have all the technical
skills associated or quickly learn them for digitizing these letters, and for building
and designing and building a website, and for transcribing and annotating and manipulating
the images of what they're doing--we bring them together with the senior citizens, maybe
we've got two different skill sets that would be very complimentary.
And what we found when we did this--when we brought together senior citizen volunteers
to work with us on this transcription and annotation--was that they loved working with
the students and the students loved working with them.
So, we were expanding the project, the reach of the project, and we were also having a
lot more fun and expanding the educational experience associated with the project as
well.
Ultimately, we also realized that we were increasing our productivity and that we were
getting more letters transcribed, annotated, coded, and posted on the website, because
the senior citizens were very very fast, once we trained them in doing the transcription
and annotation.
On the website that the students designed and that we, with the help of library staff,
have built--SewardProject.org--we've documented all the pedagogy, all the rules, all the guidelines
for what we're doing, and how to train people to do this kind of work.
We also have on the website videos that highlight some of the dimensions that we're talking
about right now of this project, and we've got other images that show the process by
which the students and the volunteers work together on these nineteenth-century letters.
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