About the project

Transcribe@Yale invites you to interact with Yale's digital collections by transcribing historic manuscripts. By sharing your expertise in specialized scripts (including the Cherokee syllabary), you can help to make these documents searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily.
The goal of Transcribe@Yale is to make special collections material more accessible for text searching, and to engage users in interacting with archives in new ways.

About the collections

Content on Transcribe@Yale is drawn from Yale University's digital collections.
The initial launch featured digitized selections from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In early 2017, documents from Manuscripts & Archvies were added.

What technology powers the site?

Transcribe@Yale is based on software from the University of Iowa's DIY History Project.
We gratefully acknowledge their generosity in sharing this code, which is a further development of the Scripto plugin for Omeka.

Can anyone participate? Do I need to register?

Anyone is welcome to contribute to the site. To get started, create an account.
All transcriptions will be licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC-0). We plan to offer bulk download of transcriptions and associated images in the near future.

Transcription Tips

  • Transcribe the Cherokee writing in syllabary characters, rather than transliterating into Latin.
  • Transliterate Micmac using a Latin orthography.
  • Don’t worry about formatting. 
  • Transcribe words as they are spelled or abbreviated.
  • Do not transcribe hyphens or spaces in words that occur at line breaks.
  • Indicate if you can’t decipher a word. If you are unsure of a word or phrase, please use [illegible], or your best guess followed by a question mark within brackets [Chattanooga?], or even [town?] or [name?].
    If you see the term [illegible] in a transcription, please try to decipher and transcribe the word.