The Material Culture of Wills Project and its call for transcribers (pasted)

 'The Material Culture of Wills' - CALL FOR TRANSCRIBERS, and a Seminar Outline for tutors

 

'The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790' is a Leverhulme-funded research project based at The University of Exeter and The National Archives. We're at an exciting point in our research: we've just launched our Zooniverse site and are now looking for a large number of volunteers to help us check and correct automatically-generated transcriptions of 25,000 wills. 

 

To get involved all you need to do is visit our ‘Zooniverse’ website, where you will be shown handwritten lines from an early modern will, alongside a transcription of the line which has been automatically-generated by our Handwritten Text Recognition model. If there are transcription errors you will be asked to correct them, before you move on to a new line from another will. Volunteers can correct as many lines as they like, fitting in transcription around other commitments, perhaps correcting a few lines while the kettle boils or in between lectures.

 

Volunteering for the project might be of particular interest to students who wish to improve their knowledge of early modern documents and/or their palaeography skills. To assist tutors we've put together a seminar outline which can be used and adapted by anyone teaching early modern history, particularly if they explore personal documents, material culture, palaeography, digital humanities, or public history.

 

The PowerPoint and seminar plan can be accessed through this link and include seminar aims and activities, suggested reading, training resources and potential discussion points.

 

Please do use these materials and share them widely, but we’d be extremely grateful if you could let us know if you do use or adapt them, or if you have any other feedback. For this, or any queries, please email e.m.vine@exeter.ac.uk - many thanks!

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