This crowdsourcing project through Zooniverse focuses on transcribing the prison records of individuals imprisoned and brought to Australia. Each prisoner had a record that included information on their current and previous convictions, a description of their appearance, occupation, and marital status. I found this project by searching through the zooniverse website, and was able to easily register and make an account and begin working on the project. Chriminal Characters is a larger running project through zooniverse that transcribes these records for all types of prison systems in the world. Currently this round is focusing on records for incarcerated people in Australia.
The goal of this project is to collect the life stories of the many men who were brough to Australia as prisoners of the Crown of England. Images were digitized and provided bu the Public Records Office of Victoria and the State Records Office of New South Whales. It is being supported through a grant and funding from University of Thechnology Sydney. The hope is to restore dignity and humanity to the people incarcerated in Australia, and to give a better picture of the full lives these people lived.
Once you create an account, a photo is given to you with a column on the right of the screen that provides text boxes and drop down menus that correlate with the information fields provided in each form. One of the pages I worked on included an image of the person, named Raven George, his height, the reason for his conviction, and his sentence. Two years hard labor for false pretenses, which could be many things, but judging by the details on the bottom half of the page it may have been impersonating an officer.
As is common with many historic documents, some time ink was faded, and the handwriting could be difficult to read, but the ability to zoom into pages very closely and look at each individual word to parse out the written letters is extremely helpful. This has been a method I use often when transcribing difficult handwriting. It helps me to zoom into individual words, and look at them one letter at a time. I also find mimicking writing what I’m looking at by hand can help me decifer the letters by feel.
If all else failed and I was completely unsure what the record was telling me (because 19th century writing and verbage in general), the project has clear instructions for illedgible writing, odd spellings, and shorthand. These directions were givien at the very beginning of the project and were able to refer back to if I needed to double check something. At the most basic level, what is written is what you transcribe, including misspellings. If something is unclear you can click a button placed under each text box that leaves a note [unclear]. This was really helpful when I wasn’t sure about leaving a word misspelled or unable to decifer a word.
Another nice thing about the project is that once you complete a record another will automatically come up for you to do. If it has already been completed by someone else there is a flag at the top that says finished. Then you can click through until you find one that hasn’t been finished. I got through three records before I got one previously completed so I may have been close to the end of the project, but I have returned a few times and been served unfinished documents. There is also a community discussion board where you can chat with others taking part in the project and talk through any questions.
In general this was a great way to begin working on community projects and helping with making other parts of history available to people. There is a double checking process once the records are finished being transcribed by the public, to help assure quality and consistency. This project will make family lineage research bore easily accessible to people who don’t feel comfortable going into an archive, or don’t feel equiped to do these transcriptions themselves. As geniology becomes more popular I think these records will be used by many people to come.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.