Venice Manuscipts Project Site

Preserving History in a Digital Age

The history of the world is contained in handwritten manuscripts stored in archives across the globe. Individual documents may seem unimportant, documenting day-to-day affairs such as birth and death records, police reports, and other local happenings. However, when collections of these manuscripts are considered as a whole, one can view histories of entire civilizations.

Unfortunately, environmental conditions such as moisture ensure that these manuscripts, which are typically written on paper, will not last forever. They yellow and grow moldy, eventually becoming unreadable. Historians are charged with the duty of transcribing these manuscripts to increase their longevity, allowing the history they describe to be maintained for future generations.

The most common and useful process for transcribing manuscripts is to create a digital transcription. A historian will sit down at a computer with a manuscript, open up a word processor such as Microsoft Word, and start typing. There are many drawbacks to this method, including lack of support for manuscript-specific font-styles (such as erased text and words written in a different hand) and an absence of collaboration opportunity. After a historian has finished transcribing a manuscript and puts it back on the archive shelves, another person could walk in the next day and start transcribing that very same manuscript that has been done the previous day, with no way of recognizing the redundancy.

The Emergent Transcriptions Initiative seeks to create an online software application to assist archivists and historians in transcribing ancient manuscripts into a digital form. Transcriptions will be stored online in a database, where others can continue to work on them. This initiative began in 1998 and is a work-in-progress.

Last Updated: April 9, 2008