Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: Whitman challenge, new datasets, & Yiddish transcriptions

By the People Bulletin

 

June is Whitman month and there's still time to join in! 

Help us close out the last week in June by jumping in to transcribe or review pages from the latest Walt Whitman addition from the Thomas B. Harned collection. This addition includes drafts of Whitman's poetry, notebooks with details of his work in Civil War-era hospitals, and correspondence to and from friends. Volunteers have already completed over 900 pages but there are still 1,300+ pages that need someone to start transcribing. 

If you enjoy reviewing transcriptions, then head over to the General Correspondence and Miscellany projects. Both have 3,000+ pages in need of review and contain a fascinating mix of all sorts of things, from letters, financial records, Whitman's birthday invitations to train tickets! 

New datasets from John and Alan Lomax campaigns 

Transcriptions from two different Lomax collections are now available for bulk download! The Alan Lomax collection includes transcriptions for many of Lomax's field notebooks containing his observations from recording trips taken around the the world. The John and Alan Lomax collection documents the formation of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Each of these sets includes a spreadsheet with full-text transcriptions and a README text file that provides detailed information about the transcriptions and spreadsheet fields. 

Help needed for Yiddish transcriptions

We're making a final push for the 2 handwritten Yiddish pages left in the Blackwell Family Papers. Do you or someone you know read Yiddish? Then we need your help transcribing the text on these two pages. Once they are complete, we can return the transcriptions from the Blackwell campaign to the Library's main website. 

 

Happy summer,

Abby & the By the People team