This sounds like so much fun.
Here's your
chance to help de-code secret telegrams sent during the Civil War.
With
support from the NHPRC, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens has launched of an innovative crowdsourcing project to transcribe and
decipher a collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Abraham
Lincoln, his Cabinet, and officers of the Union Army. Roughly one-third of the
messages were written in code.
The
“Decoding the Civil War” project is a partnership among Zooniverse (the largest
online platform for collaborative volunteer research), North Carolina State
University’s Digital History and Pedagogy Project, and the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum.
The
Huntington acquired the exceptionally rare collection of telegrams in 2012,
composed of a nearly complete archive of Thomas T. Eckert, the head of the
military telegraph office of the War Department under Lincoln. The archive was
thought to have been destroyed after the war and includes crucial
correspondence that has never been published. Among the materials are 35
manuscript ledger books of telegrams sent and received by the War Department,
including more than 100 communiques from Lincoln himself. Also included are
top-secret cipher books revealing the complex coding system used to encrypt and
decipher messages. The Confederate Army never cracked the Union Army’s code.
But you can
help by joining in at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/decoding-the-civil-war. They are looking for 75,000 volunteers.
I felt it important that I check out the user experience for y’all
(wink wink) and it was great. You are
first shown an overview of the process.
I found the tools very easy to use. There are a variety of document
types and each time I clicked next I was taken to something different.
I am quite impressed with how far crowdsourced projects have come
in such a short time!
Whether you have just a few minutes (you literally can do some of
the pages in just a few minutes) or longer, you might consider helping with
this project.
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