I have had an interesting experience working on a digital humanities initiative, a crowdsourcing project with the University of Delaware Museum Studies Program and History Media Center. It involves a Civil War chaplain’s diary that has been gathering dust for 150-years and was periodically brought out for some research.
The University digitized the diary and students, faculty and staff are pouring over fading pages from another age, scrutinizing those aging entries line by line. With students working from many remote locations since the scans are on the Net they review the hand written words and transcribe the entries. The emerging scholars then submit their contributions which are reviewed and put up on line. Eventually, the entire diary will be available for anyone to access and read and that will broaden engagement, investigation, and research with this valuable source.
It’s a collaboration with the University of Delaware that I hope to strengthen because it makes largely unused cultural heritage resources available to a wider audience. The University’s focus is in the area of the digital humanities, which allows us to take largely un-accessed collections and get the material out to a broader audience for study. It is also a preservation method in that it reduces the handling and makes interpretation much easier.
It has been fascinating to watch this new media project unfold.
