Transcribing The Past

I look at the pages of a historical text online. It could be any kind of text. A pamphlet from a bygone era, a book forgotten to time, or a newspaper that no one knows about. I scan the text, focusing on how the words are formatted on the page. I edit pre-typed text that is supposed to mirror this formatting, or sometimes type it myself. I press save on the page, happy that a small piece of history has been converted to a form suitable for online consumption. I repeat this step until I get bored and then resume it again at another point when I'm looking for something to do.

To some, that might sound like a really mundane task. In fact, it might even sound boring. For me, though, transcribing historical documents is something I take great pleasure in. From a young age, I had a habit of reading books about animals, looking at some of the passages contained within them, and typing them verbatim on a Word document. I can't explain where this came from or what inspired me to want to try this, but it became something I enjoyed doing. After a while, I stopped re-typing passages of books because I realized it was redundant to rewrite passages that were already published. Years later, this interest would come back in a way that I never expected.

I remember a couple of years ago that I found the website of the National Archives, which allowed you to transcribe their documents online. There, I found a collection of newspapers called Newsmap, which contained updates on major events during World War II. Some of these papers had already been fully transcribed, but some of them hadn't even been started. I transcribed the volumes of the newspaper that no one had started to work on yet, and I found myself engaged with the idea that I was helping an actual historical archive with preserving the text of some of their rarest documents.

Since then, I've continued finding online projects that allow you to transcribe the text of documents -- a website from the Smithsonian, pages on Wikisource, and other archival websites. I've loved browsing websites with archival material for years anyway, so being able to make a contribution to the organizations that I adore browsing is incredibly important and special to me. Preservation of history is one of the most important things we can do as individuals. It allows us to learn from our past mistakes and successes and reminds us of some of the strangest things that humans have experienced throughout our existence. A lot of people feel that history is an uninteresting subject, but that's only because they weren't taught history in a way that engaged them or sucked them into the stories of our past. When history is taught correctly, it becomes more than simply dates to memorize and becomes millions upon millions of timeless stories of how we have adapted to the civilization we have become today.

Because of this, keeping as many historical sources accessible and in acceptable condition as possible is unbelievably important to allow as thorough of an understanding of our species and stories as possible. I love looking at archival materials and feeling like I'm accessing a specific moment in our history, and I love the idea of contributing to the preservation of historical texts even more. It allows me to learn something fascinating that I didn't know before and maybe even keep a couple stories in my repertoire in case someone is interested to talk about them with me in the future. History is an important subject, and hopefully, transcribing historical documents encourages an interest in that subject.