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Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Project
Dec. 11th, 2013 02:18 amSmithsonian Digital Volunteers Project: Transcription Center
If you're interested in American History, world cultures, Art History, Botany, or other various Smithsonian subjects, you should really check this site out. Anyone with some spare time can transcribe text so that historical documents and collections will be in computer-searchable text to make it easier for scholars to use them in the future. You don't need to be an expert on the subjects, just able to read and copy. There are documents that are in perfectly legible type that are really easy to do, but there are also some that are more difficult - in scrawling cursive, or using idiosyncratic phonetic symbols (yes, you must reproduce the diacritics!). Occasionally, there are also documents that aren't in English -- if you know French, there's one up now you could help with: the flight records of the Lafayette Squadron - the group of American pilots that volunteered for the French army early in World War I. Also, if you're not up for doing the transcription yourself, you can also proofread transcriptions done by others, just checking the typed text against that in the image to make sure it matches.
So check it out and see if anything interests you.
Geek that I am, I'm having a lot of fun transcribing linguistics notes (African and Native American languages), an ethnography of Victorian India, and lately the flight book of the Lafayette Squadron. I like it because deciphering some of these documents is a bit of a puzzle but unlike sudoku or crosswords where, when you finish, all you have is a filled-in page, when you complete a page of one of these documents, you are one page closer to a fully-digitized, valuable historical document! Also, it's interesting and informative reading -- I learned how to say "my machine gun jammed" in French today :) (Okay, so, sometimes interesting isn't the same thing as useful, but I think it's cool anyways.)
If you're interested in American History, world cultures, Art History, Botany, or other various Smithsonian subjects, you should really check this site out. Anyone with some spare time can transcribe text so that historical documents and collections will be in computer-searchable text to make it easier for scholars to use them in the future. You don't need to be an expert on the subjects, just able to read and copy. There are documents that are in perfectly legible type that are really easy to do, but there are also some that are more difficult - in scrawling cursive, or using idiosyncratic phonetic symbols (yes, you must reproduce the diacritics!). Occasionally, there are also documents that aren't in English -- if you know French, there's one up now you could help with: the flight records of the Lafayette Squadron - the group of American pilots that volunteered for the French army early in World War I. Also, if you're not up for doing the transcription yourself, you can also proofread transcriptions done by others, just checking the typed text against that in the image to make sure it matches.
So check it out and see if anything interests you.
Geek that I am, I'm having a lot of fun transcribing linguistics notes (African and Native American languages), an ethnography of Victorian India, and lately the flight book of the Lafayette Squadron. I like it because deciphering some of these documents is a bit of a puzzle but unlike sudoku or crosswords where, when you finish, all you have is a filled-in page, when you complete a page of one of these documents, you are one page closer to a fully-digitized, valuable historical document! Also, it's interesting and informative reading -- I learned how to say "my machine gun jammed" in French today :) (Okay, so, sometimes interesting isn't the same thing as useful, but I think it's cool anyways.)