Black Digital Humanities scholars have often grappled with the contradiction that digitizing slavery’s archives, in the words of historian Jessica Marie Johnson, “threatens to replicate the death work of the slave ship register,” re-enacting the commodification of the people whose lives and histories they…

As a Civil War historian, I know the power of sharing primary sources with students to understand causality and intentionality in the past. For example, the former Chief Historian of the National Park Service has argued that few can read Confederate states’ declarations of…

During the summer of 2025, I spent hours and hours on end working with historical documents that weren’t intended to be heard or used in the way we are using them. As a Black woman attending a predominantly white institution (PWI), doing this transcription work went deeper than internship…

This semester, I’ve been working with two wonderful students doing mentored research projects of their own design. As they’ve been developing their research questions, I am reminded fondly of an exercise I did in a research methods class during grad school.   The professor, Dr. Ellen Goldring,…

This summer, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Amanda Laury Kleintop’s research project in Civil War digital history. I transcribed documents, collaborated with fellow research assistants, and learned more about data entry, as well as the Civil War…

In my work as a research assistant for a historical data project, I transcribed public records that contained the names of enslaved people enlisted in the Union Army, their enslavers, how much money their enslavers were supposed to receive for…

This summer, I had the opportunity to deepen my understanding of data as a research assistant under Dr. Amanda Kleintop, working with archived records from the US Slave Claims Commissions. In this role, I was responsible for transcribing documents from…

During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to work on a transcription project involving historical records from the War Department about Maryland, Missouri, and the US Bureau of Colored Troops during the Civil War. These included an account…

As the new school year begins and our weeks are filled with slide edits, planning meetings, and the smell of new notebooks, one theme is dominating the preparation: Artificial Intelligence. I am not an AI expert. I have no tips…

In this post and a series of student contributions that follow, we describe a summer project where we engaged with students doing transcription work of historical archival documents. While the original conception of the project started off as purely oriented…