A Group Effort to Preserve History
The ninth annual Frederick Douglass Day Transcribe-a-Thon connected Vols with a national network dedicated to keeping Douglass’s historic words alive and available to all.
Vol students and faculty joined local grade-school students and colleagues from across the nation February 11–13 to celebrate Frederick Douglass Day as part of Black History Month. For the past eight years, the Department of English has honored Douglass’s historic legacy with engaging keynote addresses, special collections exhibits, and the signature Transcribe-a-Thon, a day of manually transforming digitized historic writings into searchable records that are accessible to researchers and the public through the Library of Congress through their crowdsourcing platform, By the People.
The celebration spotlighted Douglass—an abolitionist, writer, and orator—as one of the most influential voices of the 19th century. His advocacy for equality, civic engagement, and human rights and his belief in education as a liberating path still inspires modern movements for change.
Building Community through the Hands-on History Experience
Participants in the transcribe-a-thon connected directly with history through the first-hand re-typing of digitized versions of handwritten works. Undergraduate students sat side-by-side with graduate students and faculty and visiting students from the UUNIK Academy of Knoxville while transcribing a variety of historical records—including letters, newspaper articles, and meeting minutes—collected by the Colored Conventions Project. These public records are made accessible so that anyone wanting to research and learn about Black history can do so.
“This event offers all of us—college students, professors, staff, and community members of all ages—the opportunity to directly help in the creation of history,” said Teaching Associate Professor Anne Langendorfer, a faculty committee member who helps organize the event alongside Assistant Professor Robert Bland, Assistant Professor Danielle Procope Bell, and UT librarians Shaina Destine and Paris Whalon. “We can better know Black history as American history by transcribing digitized records from the 19th century.”
Frederick Douglass Day activities are a collaboration between the Department of English, the Department of Africana Studies, the Department of History, and UT Libraries.
“I loved seeing faculty and students from across campus come together to celebrate the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass and the richness of Black history and culture,” said Professor Dawn Coleman, head of the English department. “It’s always an uplifting, welcoming event. They are deciphering Black Americans’ quest for freedom and recognition one page at a time, and it’s a joy to see them working together so intently on recovering this history.”
Reggie Jenkins, executive director of UUNIK Academy, enjoyed the opportunity for his young students to learn about Douglass and the heritage that he represents academically and culturally.
“Frederick Douglass is a historic figure that a lot of our young people don’t get to hear about in mainstream schools,” said Jenkins. “I appreciate this opportunity for the community to attend this so our young people can get a sense of where they come from, who they are.”
Going Places that AI Cannot
Hudson Walker, a senior double majoring in English and Africana Studies, appreciated the dual aspects of preservation and accessibility that the transcribe-a-thon embodies, and the effectiveness for these elements that comes from manual transcription.
“A lot of these items aren’t recognizable by things like AI,” said Walker. “There are doodles, handwriting, not the same typescript of today. A lot of things are faded or watermarked. It’s one of those things you physically need people to do for it to happen, and the history needs to be told or it’s not going to exist anymore.”
E.A. Wilcox, a PhD student in English, has participated in the transcribe-a-thon project for five years, both as a transcriber and as an organizational assistant.
“I was drawn to it because I think history is important. The more that we can dedicate time to history, then the more we can learn about how to be in the world today,” said Wilcox. “For my studies, it provides great training for how to work with historical documents in a way that’s really approachable. I’ve had students come and do it as well, and they’re always surprised by how much they enjoy it. It’s almost like putting a puzzle together every time you do a transcription.”
by Randall Brown