Speeding Up “Slow-Motion Scholarship”?
Archiving documents already costs money, of course. Systematic scanning of those documents and making them available online costs more.
Producing accurate transcriptions for those documents requires even more labor, with a lot of expertise and patience thrown in. That might be the most expensive stage.
The U.S. government once deemed that work important enough to fund. We can look back at precedents like the Varick Transcripts of Gen. George Washington’s letters made in the 1780s, Peter Force’s American Archives in the ante-bellum period, and the major scholarly projects of the Progressive, New Deal, and Cold War eras.
Originally based on thick printed volumes, that effort has naturally spread to computers and computer networks. Founders Online is not only hosted by the National Archives, but its constituent projects received funding through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (N.H.P.R.C.).
But that was all before the current administration set out to slash funding for historical projects that don’t feed its leader’s ego, both within the budget process and illegally outside of it. In June the Organization of American Historians issued a report titled “The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,” (P.D.F. download). It says:
Despite the impressive work done with the assistance of NHPRC grant awards, the program created by Congress often finds itself eliminated in presidential budget requests. FY 2026 and 2027 were no different, with the Trump Administration attempting to zero out the funding. As in prior years, Congress recognized the value that NHPRC brings to their districts and rebuked the effort, providing $5 million in grantmaking funds, though this represents a 50 percent cut to the program from FY2025.That’s yet another part of our national government and polity that will need repair.
Funding is only one of the challenges faced by NHPRC in 2025 and now in 2026. NHPRC is convened twice a year by the Archivist of the United States, its chair, to review grant proposals, recommend awards, and approve new calls for proposals. Without an Archivist of the United States duly confirmed by the Senate, the Commission has no chair to convene it and has not been able to meet since November 2024. This little-understood effect of the firing of the Archivist of the United States in February 2025 has blocked Congress’s intention to award millions of dollars in grant funding to archives and other historical institutions throughout the country.
To be sure, there were limitations in that approach to transcribing archives. For example, there’s always been more funding available for the papers of elite American Founders than for other sorts. (Gen. Thomas Gage came from an elite class, too, but he was on the Wrong Side.)
Those monumental projects also took decades. Back in 1997 Lingua Franca magazine published an article by Jack Hitt titled “In the Franklin Factory: Slow-Motion Scholarship in an Age of Academic Obsolescence.” It concluded with a glimpse of the Benjamin Franklin Papers editors looking ahead to the end of their work after four decades. They’re still at it.
Given that environment, it’s easy to see the appeal of artificial-intelligence software as a way to ease, speed up, and democratize the transcription of handwritten documents. If, that is, the technology actually works.
TOMORROW: Alternative approaches.
