About the project
DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. Our digital library holds hundreds of thousands of items -- much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so we're appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. Through "crowdsourcing," or engaging volunteers to contribute effort toward large-scale goals, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts become searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily. Please join us in preserving our past by keeping the historic record accessible -- one page or picture at a time.
About the collections
Content on DIY History is drawn from the Iowa Digital Library, featuring digitized selections from the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections, University Archives, and Iowa Women's Archives. DIY History will continuously be updated with additional content, so check back! If you would like to suggest items for inclusion from the UI's holdings, please contact us.
FAQ
How did this project start?
The University of Iowa Libraries began its first experiment in crowdsourcing with the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project. From the site’s debut in the spring of 2011 to commemorate the Civil War sesquicentennial, through the fall of 2012, volunteer contributors transcribed over 15,000 pages. With the diaries and letters nearly completed, the project was expanded to include transcription opportunities for handwritten materials outside of the Civil War collections; DIY History, which also features commenting and tagging functionality for our historic photograph collections, was launched in October 2012.
What is the goal of this project?
The goal of DIY History is to make historic artifacts more accessible – both by enhancing catalog records for greater ease in searching and browsing, and by engaging the public to interact with the materials in new ways. While typeset texts can be scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) technology to quickly and inexpensively add full text searchability, there’s no such easy fix for other primary source materials like handwritten documents or photographs. Making these items findable requires time-consuming manual labor to transcribe or describe each item – a process that doesn’t scale with traditional library workflows. By outsourcing this work to volunteers and attaching their contributions to the artifacts in our digital library, users can search on this added text to more quickly and easily find what they’re seeking. With DIY History, we’re also hoping to attract new users interested in more active engagement with the collections. By volunteering their time to help make these materials more accessible, participants can learn new information about past eras while assisting others, including researchers using the documents, as well as the original authors and photographers whose stories they're helping to preserve.
What technology powers the site?
Much of the DIY History source code and documentation is available for institutions who wish to build a similar transcription project.
Digitized artifacts are migrated from the Iowa Digital Library, which is managed by CONTENTdm software. The transcription pages use Omeka for content management, the Scripto plugin for transcribing, and Twitter Bootstrap for the frontend framework. The community forum is powered by Vanilla Forums. Image tagging and commenting is available through Flickr.
Can anyone participate? Do I need to register?
Anyone is welcome to contribute to the site – no special expertise is required. For transcribing documents, registration is optional. You may simply select a page and get started, or you can create an account in order to track your contributions, and create a watchlist of your favorite pages. All users may comment on images through our Flickr site, but registration is required for tagging; you'll need to sign in with a Yahoo!, Google, or Facebook account. For more information, see the Flickr sign in help pages.
Where can I read more about the project?
Below are links to articles, blog posts and media features about DIY History and our crowdsourcing projects.
- Peek into the Past: Web Project Allows Readers to Uncover Culinary History by Annie L. Scholl, Radish Magazine, Feb. 20, 2013
- The Care and Feeding of a Crowd by Shawn Averkamp and Matthew Butler, Code4Lib Conference, Chicago, Feb. 14, 2013
- Peek into Early American Kitchens with Iowa’s Recipe-rescue Project by Jessica Ferri, Shine from Yahoo!, Dec. 12, 2012
- DIY History Crowdsources the Transcription of 17th Century Cookbooks by Carren Jao, Wired.co.uk, Dec. 3, 2012
- Crowd-Sourcing Private Life, Plus Free Recipe for Biskit Pudin (With Suckit!) by Martha Bayless, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Nov. 30, 2012
- Transcribe Culinary History with the Click of a Mouse by Andy DeLoach, CNN Eatocracy, Nov. 29, 2012
- DIY History? by Yvonne Seale, HASTAC Scholars, Oct. 31, 2012
- Archive of Handwritten Recipes (1600–1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More by Kate Rix, Open Culture, Oct. 31, 2012
- Want to Make Historic Recipes? by cashman, MetaFilter, Oct. 27, 2012
- Cooking Up a Crowdsourced Digitization Project that Scales by Meredith Schwartz, Library Journal, Oct. 22, 2012
- DIY History: UI Libraries Launches New Crowdsourcing Site With Manuscript Cookbooks and More by Jen Wolfe, Iowa Now, Oct. 16, 2012
- University of Iowa Libraries’ DIY History Project by Rebecca Hopman, Ex tabulis, Oct. 13, 2012
- On the Front Lines of History by Stephen Pradarelli, Iowa Now, May 7, 2012
- Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Preserving the Past and Future by kerplunk5688, DIGital HISTory, Jan. 30, 2012
- Experimenting with Strategies for Crowdsourcing Manuscript Transcription by Nicole Saylor and Jen Wolfe, Research Library Issues, no. 277, Dec. 2011
- Crowdsourcing the Civil War: Insights Interview with Nicole Saylor by Trevor Owens, Library of Congress: The Signal: Digital Preservation, Dec. 6, 2011
- Hands-on Experience with Civil War History by Vanessa Miller, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Nov. 26, 2011
- Civil War Project Shows Pros and Cons of Crowdsourcing by Jie Jenny Zou, The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus, June 14, 2011
- How to Participate in History While Sitting on My Ass by Transcribing Civil War Diaries Online by dick_long_wigwam, Reddit, June 8, 2011
Other questions?
Please contact us, or post to the DIY History Discussion Forum (registration required).
Transcription tips
- Don’t worry about formatting. The transcription field does not accommodate formatting such as line breaks and columns. Simply transcribe interpolations above or below the line as if they were part of the text without special symbols.
- Transcribe words as they are spelled or abbreviated. Resist the temptation to correct what you see in the document.
- Do not transcribe text that has been crossed out.
- Do not transcribe hyphens or spaces in words that occur at line breaks.
- Indicate if you can’t decipher a word. If you are unsure of a word or phrase, please use [illegible], or your best guess followed by a question mark within brackets [Chattanooga?], or even [town?] or [name?].
If you see the term [illegible] in a transcription, please try to decipher and transcribe the word. - Transcribe simple forms. Please try to transcribe all elements of the document, including typewritten text that may appear in a table, form, etc. Don’t worry about formatting the transcription. If a page is entirely typewritten, do not transcribe it.
- Consider the context. If you’re having trouble with a word or passage, read “around” it and think about what a likely word would be, or look for other letters and spellings in the document that are similar.
- Consult the Iowa Digital Library record. When you are viewing a particular document in DIYHistory you will see a link above the page image that says “view in Iowa Digital Library.” This takes you another view of the digitized document as well as to useful information such as names of people, places, subjects, and events, and links to full finding aids.
- Be aware of contemporary spelling and abbreviations. Common eighteenth and nineteenth-century abbreviations and their full spellings include: inst. = a date in this month (e.g. the 15th inst.); ult. = a date in the previous month (5th ult.); &c = et cetera; Common “misspellings” and writing conventions: ware = were; thare = there; verry = very; evry = every; evning = evening; perhapse = perhaps; attacted = attacked; fiew = few; greaddeal or great eal or gread eal = great deal; fs = ss (e.g. mifses = misses); do = ditto.
- Common Civil War abbreviations: QM = Quarter Master; Capt. = Captain; Lieut. or Lt. = Lieutenant; Maj. = Major; Col. = Colonel; Prov.Gen. = Provost General; Adjt. = Adjutant; Regt. = Regiment; Brig. = Brigade; Cav. = Cavalry; Inf. = Infantry; Vols. = Volunteers; Col. Inf. = Colored Infantry; R.R. = railroad; HdQrs. = Head Quarters
- Questions about cookery: Try websites such as Food and Linda's Culinary Dictionary for a chart of old units of measure.
- Contact us for more specific questions/problems.