Dr. Julie deGraffenried and Benna Vaughan of Baylor University kindly took the time to answer questions from Sara Brumfield of FromThePage, and discussed their project and experience using the platform.
Benna Vaughan is the Special Collections and Manuscripts Archivist at Baylor University. Dr. Julie deGraffenried is the Associate Professor of History at Baylor University.
First, tell us about your documents.
Benna: Let me begin by saying that the documents we used in this project were chosen for a specific college class with specific content in mind. The professor [Dr. deGraffenried] was originally looking for some sort of teacher’s diary or something that spoke to modern childhood. I didn’t have much along those lines, but it made me think about the Evangelia Settlement papers. The Evangelia Settlement was one of the earliest known settlement houses in an urban area of Texas as well as the first daycare program for underprivileged children in Waco. The item I chose out of the collection was a minute book of the executive board from December 1914-1916. With each student in the class getting between 3-5 pages to transcribe, it would allow for a sufficient research/transcription opportunity while also giving the class the material they needed to address childhood development in that time and setting. It turned out to be the perfect material for the project.
What are your goals for the projects?
Benna: The professor [Dr. deGraffenried] had specific goals for the project which I hope she will provide. My goals, while somewhat the same, we're a bit different. What I wanted to accomplish was providing a good experience for both the professor [Dr. deGraffenried] and the students, and to see how this type of exercise would turn out with archival documents in a classroom setting. I think it was a success. The feedback from the students was mostly positive though some did have a bit of trouble with the cursive text. This, however, was a part of an additional objective of giving the students' research experience, and it did provide that as well as giving them the experience of reviewing and editing each other’s work. They were also required to read the whole minute book through the transcriptions they each provided to get an overall view of modern childhood development at that institution. After reviewing the project, I would say my goals were reached.
Dr. deGraffenried: Our college has introduced a new civic engagement requirement for all students. This past fall, I helped pilot an in-class civic engagement project for my freshman history majors. I’d heard of crowdsourced transcription projects, and over the summer, started searching online, and came across FromThePage. I took that knowledge to Benna Vaughan at Baylor’s Texas Collection and asked her if the Texas Collection had any handwritten texts that might fit the theme of our course and engage local history. Benna suggested our students work on the 1916 minutes of the Evangelia Settlement House in Waco, Texas, and arranged to complete the project on FromThePage, with financial support from our dean’s office. Over the course of the project’s completion, my students were introduced to archives and a special collection at Baylor, introduced to FromThePage and the practice of transcription, introduced to the idea of transcription as a public service that history enthusiasts can perform for the public, and learned how big movements (like Progressivism) affected local communities.
How are you recruiting or finding volunteers/collaborators?
Benna: Since this was what I would call a “closed” project for a specific class, the participants could only be those enrolled in the class. The professor [Dr. deGraffenried] and her TA were also collaborators in the project. We did not want anyone else having access to these archival documents for several reasons, and by making the project private we were able to accomplish this with no problem.
Can you share your experience using FromThePage?
Benna: First, I am no techie. Let me make that clear. I am always nervous/anxious/etc. when I begin a new project with a new platform. In this instance, I felt like there was a lot riding on this project going well and I was especially anxious that there be no snags and no mistakes on my part. What I did find with FromThePage was some easy-to-understand instructions that allowed me to upload my documents without any problem. Everything displayed as I wanted it to, and it was easy to work within the site. I found that any question I had was answered in a timely manner and I was not made to feel like the technically challenged person I really am.
It was also easy for me to explain to the students what they needed to do, which was another worry I had. The professor [Dr. deGraffenried] and I set up the class so that they could go onto the site and signup for an account during our class time. We didn’t want to have them working on the site before that day. I walked them through everything on a large monitor while they worked on their laptops. Once they signed up, the professor [Dr. deGraffenried] gave them some instruction while I added them all as collaborators and editors to the site. Once that was done, they could access their individual pages and ask me questions about what they needed to do. I added an extra copy of one of the pages to the bottom of the list and used it as a test page to play around with and see what happened when I did different things, and to display examples to them in real-time.
I did need to add some instructions for the class as to what to do with illegible text and setting that up wasn’t as clear for me as I would have liked. I am pretty sure it was because I just have no experience with coding. I found that exporting the documents and material was easy and that was another thing I worried about. I like that you could choose what type of export you wanted or all of them if you chose.
How does FromThePage & crowdsourcing fit with special collections and archives?
Benna: I can see how crowdsourcing could be used in college classrooms with many types of archival material in many different subjects. I am hoping other professors will want to give this type of project a try. I can also see the uses and benefits of transcription projects opened to the online community. Archivists rarely have the time to work on this type of thing and help is always good when you have some sort of control and/or guidelines set in place. I think can also be used to bring the local community into a closer relationship with the archive if specific language projects were opened to the community. I can see workshops with the local Hispanic community, for example. I think there are a lot of creative opportunities with this platform, and I encourage people to give it a try.
Dr. deGraffenried: As a historian, I am well aware that the archivist’s task of preserving historical evidence is never-ending. Any help that can be provided via crowdsourcing is a boon not only (one presumes) to archivists but also to historians, amateur and professional, who benefit from the increased accessibility and searchability of transcribed items.
Anything else you’d like to tell us?
Benna: I enjoyed working on this project. I am just sorry that I didn’t have the time to work on transcribing some of the materials myself. Some of the initial concerns I had with putting archival documents out there online for anyone to work with were privacy and intellectual control. Once I found out that we could make this project private, I felt much easier about it. We are in the middle of an assessment of our collections, and I plan to keep an eye out for those that would work well in this type of project. Hopefully, I will be working with you again in the future.
Dr. deGraffenried: I will add some student reflections on their experiences as FromThePage transcribers. All are first-year students at Baylor:
"As college students in the 21st century, we often take for granted the incredible pool of knowledge that exists on the internet. The amount of primary source documents that can be accessed using online sources is incredible, but we forget that someone has to transcribe each and every document we find. We quote great poets, musicians, and writers, but we forget that someone had to transcribe their original work. Transcription is tedious and difficult, but it is essential. This crowdsourced transcription project is important because it allows for this document to see the light of day. It opens up this historical time capsule to not only the scholar but to the wider public. There is so much to learn from the past, but none of that can be achieved if there is no way to access it. Scholars are most likely to benefit from this, as we opened up a new piece of evidence for Historians to use when creating arguments about the past. The impact of our transcription becomes much more impactful when it is used by the Scholar to transform the way that the world looks at something. Whether it be the way that childhood is analyzed or the way that we see charity work, our views are influenced by taking a look back, but no one can look back unless there is a middle man to guide your path. For the Evangelia Settlement, we were the middle man.
--GC
"Crowdsourced transcription work is a source of civic engagement for students of history because in transcribing old documents/papers you are adding information to one’s understanding of the past and making that information available to the public. Civic engagement is a contribution to public life, and by providing more information of the past you are adding to public life. It is important because history is important. By understanding our past we can better provide and prepare for our future. And so, all people (both the public and the transcribers/students of history) are beneficiaries of the transcription work.
--SM
"This project emphasizes civic engagement because as students we were able to uncover a part of Waco’s history. This helps us understand our community better and informs the public of the type of settlement Waco used to be. We all benefit from the information that was transcribed."
--RM
"Though it had some ups and downs, I enjoyed the transcription project because it was such a unique and applicable way to bring a history project to life. It was very refreshing to have a project that instead of simply analyzing and writing about a selected primary source, we got to become a part of the history of the document by being the first people to officially transcribe it, albeit difficult at times. At first glance of my pages, I wholeheartedly believed that I would not be able to read half of the words. However, as I slowly chugged through the first page, I began to be able to recognize recurring letters, and the frustration I first experienced disappeared and the transcription became much easier. . . .
Crowdsourced transcription is a great act of civic engagement for students of history because it makes the history itself accessible to the general public. Even if someone wanted to read this document earlier, it would be very difficult for them, and likely too time-consuming for it to have been done. However, now we have digitized an accurate transcription that anyone in the world can learn from. This is important because by creating readily accessible historical documents, scholars and history enthusiasts alike can interact with the text, allowing people to uncover and connect the web that is history and furthering humanity’s understanding of the past to show us how we should address the future. Not only do current history fans benefit, but those who wrote the document and those whose work is detailed in the pages benefit. Their stories will never be lost from now on, and generations to come will easily be able to read of and respect their compassionate efforts.
--CT
Are you a scholar who wants to use transcription in the classroom? Book a demo with Ben and Sara to find out how FromThePage can be used in the classroom.