Crowd-Sourcing the Documents of Revolutionary Boston

The Massachusetts Historical Society is one of the institutions that’s taken a crowd-sourced approach to transcribing significant collections that aren’t as monumental as the major Founders’ papers.

Traditionally, transcription projects of this size have been undertaken by one dedicated scholar, sometimes with a small team of students as assistants.

That method definitely has advantages: the editors become familiar with the writers’ handwritings, vocabulary, and references. They know the standards of the field. But such a team needs funding.

Scanning a collection and making those digital images available online has made it possible for an archive to recruit and train volunteers to transcribe pages and check each other’s work. Each page becomes a puzzle to solve, and a contribution to scholarship. That sort of project still needs funding, but not as much.

The resulting transcriptions are reliable in the same way Wikipedia has become a useful (albeit not infallible) source of information on many topics. Many sets of eyes on the same information means fewer errors survive. While A.I.-aided transcriptions may be faster, these are still more reliable.

One of the M.H.S.’s first projects of this sort was the diary of John Rowe, the politically malleable merchant. I’ve used that resource many times. Perhaps my favorite entry is Rowe’s comment about a Massachusetts Provincial Congress holiday that he went back and edited, reversing the political sentiment he originally expressed.

It looks like the M.H.S.’s team is nearly finished with the Ezekiel Price Papers. Price was a court official, notary, insurance broker, and all-around networker, with connections and gossip sources everywhere. I haven’t found as much drama in Price’s own life, but he’s a great source and observer on events.

The M.H.S. welcomes more volunteers interested in transcribing more documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The biggest drawback of these projects for me are twinges of guilt. Guilt that I haven’t yet signed up for any. Guilt that when I milk the results for Boston 1775, I follow some of my own formatting preferences (non-typewriter punctuation, paragraph breaks), breaking the rules that the volunteers so carefully follow.

But my main feeling is gratitude to all the staff and volunteers who are making those collections more available and more useable for everyone.

TOMORROW: Sampling some ongoing projects.