Overview

Transcribe @ Yale invites users from around the world to transcribe historic texts housed at Yale University. While modern typeset documents can be scanned with optical character recognition (OCR) software, handwritten materials and photographs still need humans to transform them into machine-actionable texts. Adapted from the DIY History platform developed by the University of Iowa Libraries, Transcribe facilitates the large-scale transcription of manuscripts in order to create a digital collection that is fully searchable and available for teaching, research, and general browsing.

The Kilpatrick Collection

Assembled by Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Anna Gritts Kilpatrick during the 1960s, the Kilpatrick Collection of Cherokee manuscripts contains texts from the 1890s to the 1960s. The material, entirely in the Cherokee Syllabary, documents vernacular literacy in the Cherokee language, social aspects of Christian religion and church organizations, dates and circumstances of death, funerary practices, and other topics relating to the history and culture of the Oklahoma Cherokee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pages to Words

Transcribe @ Yale is a joint experiment on behalf of the Digital Humanities Lab and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library to enable individuals who can read the Cherokee Syllabary to transcribe archival material. Anyone may register and begin transcribing, with or without a Yale affiliation. Transcriptions are created and may be shared under one of the most open licenses available, Creative Commons Attribition 4.0, to ensure the broadest possible reach and usability of the resulting texts. This data is already finding use in reasearch and teaching contexts.

Language Learning

The nonprofit 7000 Languages works with endangered language communities to create language learning software, including custom lessons based on parallel texts. With the open, Creative Commons-licensed transcriptions from Transcribe @ Yale, 7000 Languages is able to input text from the Kilpatrick papers into custom lessons so that learners can work with real shopping lists, letters, obituaries, and other materials that are valuable for learning.

Open-Source Software

Built on top of the Omeka web-publishing platform from George Mason University, Transcribe @ Yale is based on the Scripto crowdsourced transcription engine. We gratefully acknowledge the University of Iowa Libraries for further developing Scripto and sharing their code. The DHLab’s own is available online.