Digital Knowledge: NARA’s Citizen Archivist

For my Digital Knowledge Individual Assignment, I chose to contribute a transcription to the National Archives & Records Administration’s (NARA) “Citizen Archivist” program (you can read one of the pages that I transcribed here; I also transcribed several shorter pages within the same document). This program invites volunteer transcribers, metadata taggers, and historical enthusiasts to employ their skills toward increasing access to public records held within NARA’s digital collections.

In soliciting help from the public, NARA utilizes a variety of rhetorical devices. Most prominently, they implement an appeal to pathos by presenting the project through the lens of preserving history. The main informational page for the program prominently displays the message “One day all of our records will be online. You can help make it happen.” This short but effective message makes the reader feel as though they are contributing to something larger than themselves and, in a way, helping to improve our world as a whole. In a way, they are; public digital access to historical documents is incredibly important to their preservation and the general dissemination of information. By transcribing a document, you are providing a new means of searching for information; the words you transcribe may be the key words in someone’s historical research, or may enable a visually impaired person to use their screen reader program to access historical information that was previously out of their reach. Beyond the emotional appeal, ethos is also implemented; the National Archives is a big name in the archival field, and even users who know nothing about the organization will see that they are “National” and feel that the organization holds some level of significance.

There was no ambiguity to the information that I provided; everything I wrote down was a word-for-word transcription of the text featured in the digital scan of the document. I did look at a few other documents first and found that the few remaining untranscribed pages were sloppily handwritten manuscripts; had I attempted to take these on, there may have been a greater degree of ambiguity to my transcription. In these cases, NARA’s official tagging policy instructs transcribers to mark the content as “[illegible],” with the logic that attempting to transcribe these documents may do more harm than good to future researchers.

NARA mitigates risk associated with crowdsourced contributions by essentially allowing the community to police itself; while anyone can make an account and add their contributions, anyone can edit or delete another user’s contributions just as easily. Additionally, NARA claims that they will remove contributions which are off-topic, use vulgar/inappropriate/threatening/harassing language (when not present in the source text), or are clearly spam, which suggests that NARA employs some kind of moderation/administrative team which screens new submissions.

When it comes to implementation of crowdsourcing technologies at large, one of the biggest problems I foresee (and actively see) museums facing is lack of moderation. While programs like this have the potential to both improve accessibility to museum/archives collections and create engaging interactive exhibits, without active systems of content filtration/moderation and steps taken to ensure integrity of the data being collected, exhibits and projects that utilize crowdsourced data can easily be vandalized or skewed by bad faith actors. Security of data integrity is essential to the success of projects such as Citizen Archivist, and less tech-savvy institutions need to realize this and improve their data collection methods.