Transcription explorer

Browse volunteer transcriptions from Zooniverse projects. Built with Eleventy.

• Anti-Slavery Manuscripts

• Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain

  Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain is a collaborative citizen science project focused on revealing the inter-religious relations of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and religious converts during the 12th through 16th centuries in late medieval Spain. Our focus is on transactional documents, such as house leases, that reveal the day-to-day interactions that bound lives together into interfaith communities. Our primary collaborators are municipal and cathedral archives in Spain -- including -- the Archivo de la Catedral de Burgos, Archivo Municipal de Burgos, Archivo y Biblioteca de la Catedral de Toledo, Archivo Municipal de Toledo, Archivo Municipal de Plasencia, Archivo de la Catedral de Plasencia, Archivo Historico de la Nobleza (Toledo), and the Archivo Municipal de Granada. Our project site is https://grants.uccs.edu/deciphering-secrets.

• Davy Notebooks Project

  Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was one of the most significant and famous figures in the scientific and literary culture of early nineteenth-century Britain, Europe, and America. Davy’s scientific accomplishments include: conducting pioneering research into the physiological effects of nitrous oxide (often called ‘laughing gas’); isolating seven chemical elements (magnesium, calcium, potassium, sodium, strontium, barium, and boron) and establishing the elemental status of chlorine and iodine; inventing a miners’ safety lamp; developing the electrochemical protection of the copper sheeting of Royal Navy vessels; conserving the Herculaneum papyri; and writing an influential text on agricultural chemistry. Davy was also a poet, moving in the same literary circles as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth. To date, only a very small proportion of Davy’s manuscript notebooks have been transcribed and published. What makes Davy’s notebooks especially fascinating is that they are generically mixed, containing records of his thoughts, scientific experiments, poetry, geological observations, travel accounts, and personal philosophy. By joining the Davy Notebooks Project, you can help researchers at Lancaster University and the Royal Institution of Great Britain to transcribe and digitally preserve seventy-five of Davy’s notebooks, used throughout his lifetime. Together, we will learn more about Davy, his work, and the relationship between poetry and science.

• Beyond Borders: Transcribing Historic Maine Land Documents

  Maine Historical Society received a grant in the summer of 2020 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fully digitize three significant land collections covering 1625-1893. In addition to digitization, Maine Historical is making an effort to transcribe these collections for easier access to their historic content. Once completed, the digital representation of these collections and their transcriptions will be available through the Maine Memory Network.

  Check back often as we will be adding additional images as we complete the digitization of these three collections!

• Corresponding with Quakers

  Corresponding with Quakers is an ongoing, collaborative research project investigating the Ballitore Collection held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. The Ballitore Collection features more than 2,500 documents related to the Irish Quaker community of Ballitore, Ireland, including letters, journals, notebooks, and dream accounts. Originally assembled by the author Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826), this unique, understudied collection offers important insights into the intersection of gender, race, and religion in this period. The project, with funding from the UC-HBCU Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, seeks to investigate and document the collection and in doing so to shed light on the transatlantic development of abolitionist thought, women’s writing, and communal religious practices. We are in the process of digitizing the collection for public access as well as computational analysis.

• People's Contest Digital Archive

  The People's Contest Digital Archive collects the experiences of Americans living in Pennsylvania during the era of the American Civil War. It promotes research and understanding of the ways in which people of different backgrounds went about their lives during the mid-19th century. Providing transcriptions of the diaries and journals in the People's Contest helps us to broaden access to the materials and contribute to our understanding of life during the Civil War era.

  By helping to transcribe the diaries and journals, you will be helping us to provide access to these collections, to promote the institutions who contributed them to the project, and to help with teaching, research, and engagement around 19th-century American history. You will also be helping to build educational opportunities around the use of archival and special collections.

  The People's Contest is a collaborative project of the University Libraries and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Center at Penn State University. The project website features a unique statewide bibliographic database of hidden collections, digitized manuscripts, and contextual essays.

• Poets & Lovers

  The poets, dramatists, and diarists Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) wrote collaboratively under the composite name "Michael Field." They were also lifelong lovers as well as aunt and niece, and considered themselves married. Their lyric poetry and historical verse-dramas are well known. Less known is the co-written diary that records their lives and literary endeavors from 1888 until their deaths. In addition to their own aesthetic response to events both contemporaneous and historically-resonant, it offers powerful historical documentation of the construction of a queer identity and chronicles the cultural life of fin-de-siècle London and Europe, detailing encounters with the leading literary and artistic figures of the period.

• Maria Edgeworth Letters

  The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was the most commercially successful novelist of her age and a favorite author of Jane Austen's. She was an extraordinary woman writing at the turn of the nineteenth century whose ideas on gender, race, religion, education, and science have important ramifications today. Her life in Ireland spanned the upheaval of the 1798 Rebellion to the beginning of the Great Famine, and her network included correspondents in Europe, North America and India. She was one of the first authors of fiction specifically written for children. However, a comparatively small number of her letters have been published. The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (https://mariaedgeworth.org/) seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by creating a digital space where Edgeworth’s full correspondence is made available, searchable, and is eventually annotated through a collaborative open-access project. Transcriptions created through the Zooniverse platform will be checked, encoded, and eventually added to our digital archive for researchers.

• PRINT

  We are a collaborative digital humanities project tracing communication networks of early modern Europe and how these networks shaped migration in the Atlantic world. PRINT brings together 3,000 letters from religious minorities (Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. Using these letters, we are learning about the lives of ordinary people, while drawing larger understandings about mobility, migration, and travel during this period, and how making connections shape our world today.