Community NY: Shared Work, Shared History

I have a standing appointment with friends every other Wednesday at the Penfield Community Center. We chat about our families and our travels, and provide encouragement relative to upcoming projects and health challenges. I review their transcriptions and give them new letters... wait, what? Full disclosure, everyone: these folks are more than friends. They are some of the amazing volunteers who I and other project staff work with on the Seward Family Digital Archive Project at the University of Rochester.

The Seward Family Digital Archive Project is in its seventh year transcribing, annotating, and digitizing letters produced between the 1820s and 1870s by the William H. and Frances M. Seward family of Auburn, New York. While many New Yorkers (and Alaskans, for that matter) are familiar with the name William H. Seward—New York State governor, Senator, U.S. secretary of state, and the man behind the 1867 acquisition of Alaska—fewer people are familiar with his family and their important place in his political and personal life. In 1951, the Seward family letters came to the University of Rochester where they have aided generations of scholars in piecing together a richer picture of nineteenth-century life, a noteworthy list including Team of Rivals author Doris Kearns Goodwin and Seward’s best-known biographer, Glyndon G. Van Deusen, whose 1967 book, William Henry Seward, remains a trusted source for historians of Seward and of the period.

The needs of researchers and our technological capabilities have evolved dramatically over the subsequent sixty years since the letters came to Rochester. Cumbersome card catalogs and finding aids have been replaced with easily searchable online versions. The physical letters, along with their transcriptions, are also accessible online to researchers remotely. And text encoding allows scholars to access and cross-reference unprecedented layers of information. But the abilities of scholars have evolved, too, most notably among those born in a post-cursive world.

In 2014, this situation came to the attention of a project staff member presenting on the Seward family at a local retirement community. Stumbling over a letter’s ornate script projected on an overhead screen, participants in the audience quickly (and politely) corrected his mistake. The incident highlighted a sobering fact—fewer and fewer of us are comfortable, much less able, to read cursive. Recognizing this deficiency, project staff asked themselves whether this project could offer something more to the community than just an online archive. What if the project created a shared learning space between students and community members that drew upon our different strengths and, in the process, improved the quality of our work and heightened its relevancy for the public? Win–win, right? You bet.

Seward Family Digital Archive Project team at the Seward House Museum, fall 2017. (photo by carrie n. knight.)

The Seward Family Digital Archive Project now works with more than twenty volunteers at four different locations, including Pittsford, Brockport, and Penfield. The volunteers are given digital images of letters written by different authors and asked to transcribe their contents on a computer word processor. Their task is deceptively difficult. Handwriting in nineteenth-century America was not standardized in the manner it is today. A hodgepodge of Copperplate, English Roundhand, and Spencerian script prevailed, complicated by individual styles of writing that make transcription as much a puzzle to solve as a process to be undertaken. Inconsistent spelling further challenges the transcriber, as do ink stains, holes, and squiggles that vaguely resemble words.

Once these hurdles have been surmounted, volunteers are asked to annotate all persons, places, and books mentioned within the letters. These annotations are later linked within the encoded text to databases where researchers may gain additional information. Annotation can be a frustrating undertaking or a rewarding adventure depending on your outlook and your familiarity with online search tools and resources. Project staff have assisted volunteers in navigating this sea of information, familiarizing them with valuable databases and search engines such as HathiTrust, Archive.org, Google Books, WorldCat, and Ancestry.com that markedly enliven the text of their letters. My visits to...