Anti-Slavery Manuscripts now available for the public to transcribe

Edit: This project is now complete. Please refer to our Anti-slavery Manuscripts Final Project Update blog post for more information.

For the past several years, we have been carefully cataloging and digitizing manuscript correspondences from our Anti-Slavery collection. These items document the thoughts, transactions, and activities of the abolitionist movement in Boston, Massachusetts, and throughout New England. Over 12,000 of these letters were recently made available on Digital Commonwealth. This work was made possible through the support of the Associates of the Boston Public Library.

In order to make this collection more valuable to researchers, scholars, and historians we are pleased to announce the launch of a new website. This website will make these handwritten items available for you to transcribe into machine readable text. This site was created and will be hosted by the development team at Zooniverse.org. Transcription will allow the text to be more precisely searchable and better suited for natural language processing applications. This helps researchers better understand patterns, relationships, and trends within the linguistics of this particular community. We are especially excited to be launching on National Handwriting Day. We encourage you to celebrate by registering for the site and trying it out!