Transcriptions Completed

A week ago Friday, I learned about the Douglass Day transcription project and promptly joined this crowdsourced effort to transcribe printed documents related to the series of Black political organizing conventions in the 19th century. The big push for this project was on Friday the 13th, but volunteers continued on and yesterday finished transcribing the entire collection. There were 1,445 volunteers who transcribed text from 3,416 images of documents. I ended up transcribing 32 documents over 10 days.

I am really happy with the way the effort turned out. This was a way to participate in Black History Month, the volunteers quickly got through the collection, and I discovered that online transcription is a contribution path towards increasing the accessibility of historical archives. It turns out there are plenty of opportunities to do this sort of thing online, through programs at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and other places I’m sure. I will be looking into these.