Welcome Back!

To our long-time community of transcribers: welcome back!

With the new look and feel of the site, we wanted to let those of you who have been with us for years know about some of the changes and new features of transcribing with the Papers of the War Department.

First of all, because of the move to a new transcription system, you will have to sign up for a new user account. You can use the same username as in the past, or create a completely new one if you like. 

We’re Back!

The Papers of the War Department team is happy to announce that we’re back online!

The last time you heard from us, we were putting transcriptions on hold to start a total redesign of the Papers of the War Department website with the support of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. This included migrating nearly 200 gigabytes of Papers of the War Department items, metadata, and image files into Omeka S, which now powers the website with a fully redesigned look and feel. We’ve also released an updated beta version of the Scripto plugin, which is facilitating transcription, with updated functionality for an easier transcription process.

Transcription Freeze Begins on May 15

The PWD and Scripto teams at RRCHNM are making great progress in our efforts to upgrade and re-design the website and user’s experience.

Jim Safely is tackling the major work involved in managing the migration as well as redeveloping the Scripto transcription tool for Omeka S that will be integrated into the new Papers of the War Department digital edition.

To inform the redesign and user experience, Alyssa Fahringer and Megan Brett surveyed current PWD transcribers and Scripto + Omeka users. Jim Safely and Kim Nguyen are incorporating that feedback into Scripto’s data model, combining technical and user experience requirements for administrative editorial actions, and for the public space for transcription.

New Grants to Support PWD

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) received two grants in 2017 that will ensure the long-term stability and accessibility of the Papers of the War Department (PWD).

The first comes from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as one of five digital extension grants to migrate PWD to Omeka S that will offer efficient upgrade of the infrastructure and will provide a path for long-term preservation and access, while also allowing the team to redesign the user interface. This will enable greater use and discoverability of these early federal documents. Once fully migrated to Omeka S, the project’s existing metadata, which includes the names of thousands of individuals and geographic places referenced in correspondence, will be connected across the semantic web as linked open data.

In Memory of Lt. Col. Ronald J. Martin, USMC, Retired

On July 14, 2016, the Rosenzweig Center lost Ronald J. Martin, a longtime and valuable member of our team, to his struggle with cancer. Ron came to the Center in 2008 to serve join the team of scholars editing the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and was integral to our work with the National Park Service on the history of the War of 1812. He was an enthusiastic partner in our work to share early American history with the public, and we mourn his passing.

Celebrate the Five Year Anniversary of Community Transcription!

March 17, 2016

For Immediate Release: Celebrate the Five Year Anniversary of Community Transcription with the Papers of the War Department

Celebrate the five year anniversary of community sourced transcription with the Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 (http://wardepartmentpapers.org). An ongoing innovative documentary editing project, the Papers of the War Department is comprised of 0ver 42,000 digitized manuscript documents made freely accessible on the web by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) (http://chnm.gmu.edu/). In 2011, RRCHNM embarked on the effort to engage the larger community of citizen historians in the process of transcribing these important documents. By transcribing the digitized manuscripts, users contribute to the collection’s usability and searchability. March 17, 2016 marks five years since the launch of the community transcription project  Papers of the War Department and we are delighted at its success thus far.

PWD featured in Chronicle Article

This week the hard work of the PWD editors and volunteer transcribers was featured in an article entitled “Historians Ask the Public to Help Organize the Past,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Reporter Marc Parry offered the story of the archive’s original reconstruction, its innovative online-first format, and our use of community transcription. The piece includes interviews with Editor-in-Chief Christopher Hamner, archive originator Ted Crackel, and the director of the Scripto community transcription tool project Sharon Leon.

Volunteer to be a Transcription Associate

We are pleased to announce the launch of community transcription with the Papers of the War Department.  Beginning today, interested volunteers can register to begin transcribing any of the materials in this groundbreaking digital archive.

With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities and the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, PWD is pioneering a new phase in digital documentary editing with an alpha implementation of Scripto, RRCHNM’s open source tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription, by allowing users to transcribe historical documents and contribute them to a digital archive of correspondence, speeches, accounting logs, and other documents from early American history.

PWD featured in NY Times article about crowdsourcing transcription

The Papers of the War Department project was featured in a recent article in the New York Times about efforts to crowdsource documentary transcription. At the end of January 2011, PWD will implement the Scripto transcription tool, allowing users to contribution transcriptions of the 55,000 documents in the PWD archive. With funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Scripto will provide editors of digital documentary collections with a way to harness the power of the public to build a base of transcription text that will improve document findability and ease of use.  Scripto is a PHP-based, free and open source plugin, that will connect to common content management systems.

Welcome to the PWD blog

We’re pleased to introduce the Papers of the War Department blog, a forum that provides space to share information about the archive, its documents, and the history of the United States War Office in the late-eighteenth century. In coming weeks, we will introduce more categories to the blog, highlight particularly interesting documents and figures, and offer some tips to better utilize the search engine and the collection.