New projects in January or Febuary?

Hi Evan,

Great question! We won't be releasing any new transcription projects until March 2023 when we'll launch a campaign featuring several different collections documenting women's experiences during the Civil War. The reason we decided to take a short break from releasing new content is that there is a lot to transcribe and review in our existing campaigns. We hope to close out or make good progress on some of the campaigns already in the site before launching new material.

We have a full slate planned for next spring, however, so be in the lookout for updates in the new year on what's coming in 2023!

Best,

Abby

By the People Community Manager

Hi Evan,

Great question! We won't be releasing any new transcription projects until March 2023 when we'll launch a campaign featuring several different collections documenting women's experiences during the Civil War. The reason we decided to take a short break from releasing new content is that there is a lot to transcribe and review in our existing campaigns. We hope to close out or make good progress on some of the campaigns already in the site before launching new material.

We have a full slate planned for next spring, however, so be in the lookout for updates in the new year on what's coming in 2023!

Best,

Abby

By the People Community Manager

That new campaign sounds interesting.

Is there ever a point when you simply "pull" some of the material as it is really impossible to read (very light, handwriting is too difficult to interpret, etc.)? As I am going through the entries that are still outstanding, many of them I find to be unreadable. I am in awe of anyone that can manage them, but sometimes they just seem beyond doing.

Do you have an example Doreen? I am curious to see if any of the new edit tools or other tools I have used would work on those pages.

Henry

Hi Henry,

Just ran across this one. Maybe eyes that are better than mine could tackle it, but for me...it's a pass.

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/clara-barton-angel-of-the-battlefield/subject-file/mss119730460/mss119730460-21/

One more...

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/clara-barton-angel-of-the-battlefield/letterbooks-reflection-and-retirement/mss119730176…

Hi Doreen- I transcribed page 204 as best I could. Look it over if you want and let me know if you have any edits. The left side just looked like bleed through and I did not think there was anything to do.

I decided not to do the page 21 as I do not really like doing charts.

Henry

Hello, Henry (Rosenberg) ; Hello to Ms. (Doreen) Hurley .

I had some major difficulty with deciphering page "204"; as for page "21", I am not planning to work on it tonight -- partly because it really isn't easy to transcribe a "chart" or "table" with over 10 rows and columns within a given space (although if I were able to concentrate on it and did not have the problem of listing all the columns, I could most-probably decipher the French-language items in the left-most column. (I will Tag for "French-language text" as well as "English-language text"; at least 1 date at the top seems to be in English (I see "January", and not "janvier" [Shrug] .)

I will merely agree that it is true that some scanned texts are harder to decipher (often due to faintness of the text and/or an unfamiliar language and/or abbreviations) than others, and that charts/tables with many vertical columns can be very hard to transcribe (if not impossible) within a limited space; I will also add the corollary that basic knowledge of English-language cursive handwriting from within the past century is often not enough to decipher and transcribe every scan that I have seen at CROWD/"By The People" (so please don't think that the "You've got this!" that you see means that difficulties with deciphering and/or transcribing are "just my fault": that text is meant to be encouraging, but it isn't actually true for every transcriber for every text which is presented ["Sigh"] .

Ethan W. Kent ("EthanFromBellmore" at the National Archives Catalog, "CROWD"/"By The People", and History Hub) .

Edited a bit as I was able to decipher it reasonably well [???] with the new graphic tools.  Two words remain a question to me, so maybe you guys can look at it again.

Hi Henry, Ethan, and Diane,

Thanks for looking at these culprits. This really is a teamwork project. What a sense of satisfaction when you are able to transcribe what seems impossible (to me) documents.

Hi Doreen- Glad to help out. You want to see mind numbing? Look at this page and the 5 that follow. These are among the hardest pages I ever attempted and there have been a few starting with Mary Church Terrell's chicken scratch. You learn, first, how they make certain letters, fill out as many words as you can, develop context and then go back and try to figure out as many words as possible. I spent about 2 hours on those 6 pages and still have a few [?].

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/rough-rider-bull-moose-theodore-roosevelt/political-storm/mss382990109/mss382990109-691/