Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: A new Hannah Arendt campaign & some fascinating reads

By the People Bulletin

A new campaign - Hannah Arendt 

May is Jewish American Heritage Month! To celebrate, we've released our latest campaign "Woman of the World: Political Thinker Hannah Arendt." Check out Library of Congress curator Barbara Bair's fascinating blog post about the "public intellectual, political theorist, cultural critic, lecturer, teacher, and writer," excerpted here:

"Born and educated in Germany, Arendt was from a secular Jewish family that had roots in both Germany and Russia. As a young woman she fled the Third Reich for France. She spent eight years living in exile in Paris with other intellectual activists, where she worked on behalf of Zionist refugee organizations. She was interned in France as a foreigner and a Jew, and was helped through a refugee aid network to leave the country and immigrate to the United States in 1941.

Arendt made a life as a New Yorker and became one of the western world’s most prominent public intellectuals." Click here to continue reading!

Since launching last week, volunteers have already started over 1,500 crowdsourced transcriptions! This will be a rolling campaign, so keep an eye out for future additions soon.

Completed transcriptions: what happens next?

If you've ever wondered what happens to your transcriptions, check out these other two recent blog posts:

• ETL: Searching the Lomax family papers through the magic of crowdsourcing

• Using Crowdsourced Transcriptions: An Interview with Allison Johnson

Transcriptions take quite a journey once they are completed by you, our amazing volunteers. Our friends at the American Folklife Center have put together a useful post about "ETL" (the technical process by which developers add things to loc.gov) and how to access the crowdsourced Lomax transcriptions now in loc.gov. Once your transcriptions reach loc.gov, they truly have a real-world impact! For the second post, we interviewed SJSU professor Allison Johnson about how crowdsourced transcriptions (from one of our very first campaigns!) influenced her research. She also shares how hosting a transcribe-a-thon helped introduce her students to archival documents.  

We love hearing from you, so please let us know if you've also found yourself using or exploring completed transcriptions. You can always reach us at crowd@loc.gov.

Happy transcribing!

Carlyn & the By the People team