Transcription event honors abolitionist
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Staff and students at Penn State Altoona honored the birthday of noted abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass by participating in a digital transcription event hosted by the Penn State Center for Black Digital Research.
Gathering Wednesday afternoon in the Eiche Library, volunteers worked to transcribe handwritten letters and writings from the extensive collection left by Douglass onto the By the People platform hosted by the Library of Congress.
Since 2017, Douglass Day celebrations have been held across the country to commemorate his life and legacy, with participatory events to digitally transcribe the correspondence of a different Black historical figure every year.
More than 32,000 people across 725 locations have contributed to the combined transcription project since the event's inception.
"This is our second year hosting ... so our campus is participating in the larger event," librarian Jacob Gordon said. This year, more than 160 locations are holding Douglass Day festivities.
"All the correspondence is coming from the Library of Congress collection," Gordon said. According to the transcription site, more than 1,038 pages have been successfully transcribed, representing 11% of the total pool of Douglass' assembled writings.
The goal of the transcription is to make the collection more accessible to historians and researchers, if they are unable to physically consult the Library of Congresses archive.
"So not everyone has to struggle through decoding the handwriting," Gordon said, "it also helps with the searchability of it, since they can search for keyword phrases."
Library Director Bonnie Imler helped bring Douglass Day to Penn State Altoona.
"I've taken part in several other transcription projects, some for the Smithsonian, some other ones for the Library of Congress, so I believe very strongly in this," Imler said.
As a librarian, Imler said that she holds high regard for the value of transcription events.
"It's so important because it makes these documents searchable," Imler said.
According to Imler, the ability to keyword search a collection of writing can save a researcher countless hours of combing through a physical collection.
"Especially when searching for one particular aspect of someone's life, it's one thing being able to do a keyword search on several volumes of correspondence, instead of having to go in and try to scan down each and every letter," Imler said.
This functionality requires volunteer contribution, since current technology lacks the necessary text-translation capacity.
"The fact that we have all of these documents -- many of them that are written in (cursive) script, a computer cannot naturally read the script so it takes a human's eyes to type it in and put it in a format that allows the computer to search it," Imler said.
Since a majority of Douglass's writings are in cursive, this poses a challenge to contemporary scholars, many of whom are less familiar with the distinctive script than their parents' generation, she said.
"It was always challenging to read different individuals' handwriting," Imler said. "Without being taught how to read cursive, it's going to be even more of a challenge for the generations coming up, and we don't want this to be lost."