Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: AFL campaign, new blog post, & Hockley dataset 

By the People Bulletin

 

New campaign focuses on US Labor History! 

By the People just launched a new campaign of selections from the American Federation of Labor (A.F.L) records. The three projects highlight the time periods surrounding some key labor events of the 20th century: the International Ladies Garment Workers Union Strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and a summer of racist violence in 1919, known as Red Summer. These events and the broader A.F.L. collection reflect the tumultuous and contested first decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Immigration, rapid urbanization, civil rights struggles, and the women's suffrage movement shaped the way workers in the early twentieth century thought about their labor and sought to improve working conditions. 

You'll notice that many pages in this campaign come from the letter books of Samuel Gompers. Born in London in 1850, Gompers emigrated with his family to the United States in 1863 and worked as a cigar maker. He emerged as a dominant voice in labor in the late nineteenth century, leading the A.F.L. for nearly every year from its establishment in 1886 until his death in 1924.

The A.F.L. emerged as the largest union of its day, representing hundreds of thousands of workers in a wide array of industries. The union's records provide a glimpse into the political and social movements that characterized the Progressive Era (1890-1920) in the US and around the world. Transcribe A.F.L. correspondence to learn about labor issues animating workers from small towns like Denton, Texas to major cities like New York City. 

Latest blog post features student-teacher volunteer team

We published a new volunteer vignette on The Signal blog about a student who recruited her teacher to help transcribe a Yiddish playbill in the Federal Theatre Project campaign! Students and educators are a big part of the By the People volunteer community and we love highlighting their contributions. If you're an educator looking to incorporate transcription into your classroom or a student looking for virtual volunteer hours, check out our Resources page for more information.

New dataset available for Frederick Hockley campaign

We've just made a full set of transcriptions from the "Seers, spiritualists, and the spirit work: the experiments of Frederick Hockley" campaign available on the Library's website. Our datasets include a downloadable spreadsheet of all of the transcriptions for the campaign as well as a guide, called a README, that explains how the transcriptions were created, what each data field means, and provides some contextual information about the campaign. These sets make transcriptions available for computational use and we're looking forward to see how people will use the data!

 

Happy transcribing,

Abby & the By the People team