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 towards historical research, we realized through ongoing conversations that there were a host of lessons to be learned about what it means to engage in equitable and engaged teaching of data literacy. In this series, we, along with the students who worked on this project (Mia Arango, Daisy Martinez-Jimenez, Brooke Frizzell, Elon Brown, and Annabelle Richardson), will share some of those lessons. 

About the Project 

Amanda 

Historians—at least those of my generation—aren’t typically trained to work with quantitative data and spreadsheets, but sometimes archival records take us in that direction. While completing my first book, Counting the Cost of Freedom, about debates over compensating enslavers in the former Confederacy for freed slaves after the US Civil War, colleagues pointed me to detailed records outlining how some loyal enslavers in the Border States—slave states that remained in the US during the Civil War: Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, parts of Tennessee, and West Virginia—were promised remunerations when enslaved men they once claimed ownership over joined the US Army and were freed.  

President Abraham Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 freed enslaved people in the Confederacy, but not the Border States. To chip away at slavery there, in 1863–1864, the Lincoln administration and Congress promised to pay loyal Border State enslavers up to $300 for enslaved men who enlisted or were drafted in the US Army and created the Slave Claims Commissions to hear enslavers’ claims. Enslavers submitted claims for 11,600 soldiers from 1864–1866. The US did not pay the majority of claims, but the Commissions collected the names of the former enslavers and soldiers, rare demographic information about them, their families, and the monetary values of enslavers’ awards. State lists compiled by Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky supplement national records. The resulting records are what I regularly refer to as “nineteenth-century spreadsheets.” 

Practical Application

Since I have some background in the digital humanities, I’ve long hoped to engage students in the work of transcribing these spreadsheets and transforming the data for historical and genealogical research on slavery and African American history. This past summer, with the help of Elon’s Faculty Research & Development, DataNexus, the Center for Engaged Learning, and the Digital and Spatial Humanities Collaborative (DaSH), I hired a number of undergraduate research assistants (RAs) to begin the transcription work.  

The undergraduate research assistants on this project were responsible for transcribing the archival, handwritten records into spreadsheets. Through this process, students learned some very specialized skills, like how to read nineteenth-century cursive and follow a style guide for the transcription of historical records. In the process of working with the RAs, Cora helped me see how this work was also closely linked to our project of teaching data literacy and equity, and I invited her to join the project and engage in ongoing conversations with the students about their work.  

Building an Education Experience from Data Transcription 

Amanda and Cora 

Beyond the specific skills of historical transcription, students also got a front-row seat into how a dataset becomes a dataset. The editors of the book Raw Data is an Oxymoron state that the book’s title is less an argument than a prompt and a reminder “that data are always already ‘cooked’ and never entirely ‘raw’” (Gitelman 2013). The summer research assistants were confronted with taking data that was itself already ‘cooked’ through the processes of early record keeping, and further ‘cooking’ that data to turn it into something that could exist in the digital world.  

To support students’ learning and to ensure that the new dataset was created with integrity for the humanity that comes with working with such sensitive material, we engaged in a series of additional discussions with students. In early meetings, we asked students to reflect on the process of transcription. In particular, we asked them whether the data was reliable in its original form and as a transcript. Immediately, students discussed the risks of misinterpretation and the give-and-take of making data accessible in digital form but maybe less reliable in transcription.

We also decided to directly transcribe the data rather than transform it, which would have required cleaning, recategorizing, or reorganizing the data as we went in an attempt to match the original source as much as possible. Students immediately saw the importance of transcribing the data as accurately as possible when they realized how easy it would be to embed their own assumptions into the data transformation process if they were to edit the documents as they went. At the same time, they learned to recognize how human error still exists, despite these efforts.   

Engaging with the Literature

The RAs’ commitment to accuracy came in large part from conversations about how each row of data represented a person experiencing a moment of emancipation, official freedom from an enslaver as recognized by the federal government. These commitments came out in conversations about scholarship in the Black Digital Humanities, particularly Jessica Marie Johnson’s paper “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” The paper is a touchstone in the field of Digital Humanities.

It addresses critiques that digitizing the study of slavery could replicate the work of the slave ship register or account book, reducing people to numbers in the violent process of creating slavery. Among other important ideas, the article argues that Black digital practice offers a way of thinking about Black life that promotes “social justice, accessibility, and inclusion” (Johnson 2018). After this session, we read a number of ethics statements from digital projects in slavery studies and African American history. As a team, we created ethics statements to guide the creation and use of this data and positionality statements to describe the relationship between the data curation team and the data transcription and compilation process.  

Students Reflect 

At the end of the summer, we invited students to write their own reflections for the Center for Engaged Learning blog about what it was like to work on this project. The depth of these reflective pieces blew us away with their insight and honesty.  

We are sharing these posts one by one so that the audience can hear each student’s voice in its entirety. However, we do want to direct readers to notice the ways in which the following themes show up in their reflections: 

• The nature of data and what it means for data to be “quantitative” versus “qualitative” 
• The emotional labor of working with records about formerly enslaved people and their enslavers 
• The reality and discomfort of sitting with uncertainty 

After all five blog posts are published, we’ll provide our own reflections on what it was like to work on this project and how these experiences will inform our own approaches to teaching data literacy and equity. 

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References 

Gitelman, Lisa, ed. 2013. Raw Data is an Oxymoron. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9302.001.0001.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36 (4): 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.

Additional Reading: Ethics Statements 

Enslaved.org. 2025. “Statement of Ethics.” Revised February 14. https://enslaved.org/statementofEthics. 

LifexCode. n.d. “About–Surfacing.” https://www.lifexcode.org/about. 

On These Grounds: Slavery and the University. n.d. “Ethical Commitments.” https://onthesegrounds.org/s/OTG/page/ethical-commitments. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “On Digital Defragmentation.” Kinfolkology. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-digital-defragmentation. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “On Data and Reckoning.” Kinfolkology. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-data-reckoning. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “On Kinship, Data & Descendant Engagement.” Kinfolkology. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-kinship-data-descendant-engagement. 

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About the Authors 

Cora Wigger is an assistant professor of economics and a 2025–2027 CEL Scholar. Her research focuses on the intersections of education and housing policy, with an emphasis on racial inequality and desegregation. At Elon, she teaches statistics and data-driven courses and contributes to equity-centered initiatives like the “Quant4What? Collective” and the Data Nexus Faculty Advisory Committee. 

Amanda Laury Kleintop is an assistant professor of history and a 2025–2027 CEL Scholar. She specializes in the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and emancipation. Her book, Counting the Costs of Freedom (2025), explores debates about compensating former enslavers in the US and profitmaking in slavery. It inspired her historical data and digital humanities project on African American soldiers in the Border States. 

How to Cite This Post 

Klientop, Amanda, and Cora Wigger. 2025. “Engaging Students in Transcribing Historical Data: About the Project.” Center for Engaged Learning (Blog). Elon University, October 21, 2025. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/engaging-students-in-transcribing-historical-data-about-the-project.