ENWhat is FromThePage?
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FromThePage is software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents online. This particular instance has been installed by the UT Library to explore opportunities for crowd-sourcing and student participation in document transcription projects involving UT collections. We invite all members of the UT community to work together and create transcription projects. We host projects from a wide variety of institutions across the university, from LLILAS Benson the Archaeology faculty. Any member of the community interested in using FromThePage in their research or in the classroom is encouraged to reach out to allyssa.guzman [at] austin.utexas.edu for more information. If you are interested in learning more about how to use FromThePage, please check out our LibGuide for a full walk-through of FromThePage features.
History
Jennifer Hecker at UT Libraries first began using FromThePage for the Austin Fanzine project in early 2015. In the summer and fall of 2015, the Provost’s Teaching Fellows program supported customization for UT and deployment on a UT Libraries test server as part of Adam Rabinowitz’s PTF project, which focused on crowdsourced archival transcription as a pedagogical tool. This pilot project involved the transcription of portions of the archives of Texas lawmaker and UT founder Judge Alexander Watkins Terrell, held at UT’s Briscoe Center for American History. In 1894, Terrell visited the site of Troy and tried to convince UT to purchase the site and/or Frank Calvert’s archaeological collection, and the letters describing this were transcribed for a UGS course on the Trojan War in the fall of 2015. Subsequent iterations of that UGS class have transcribed papers on Terrell’s diplomatic activities in the mid-1890s. In 2017, Albert Palacios, with support from LLILAS-Benson, arranged for the transition of the UT Libraries instance of FromThePage from a development server to a stable production environment. This permanent UT Libraries instance is now the platform for international transcription projects supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pelagios Commons, and the focus of a major new grant from the NEH, directed by Allyssa Guzman, to expand FromThePage’s multilingual capacity and develop workflows to incorporate citizen transcription contributions into archival collections.
Featured Projects
In addition to some of Terrell’s papers related to his visit to Troy and subsequent experiences, there are a host of other completed and incomplete projects available for viewing on FromThePage. Below is a periodically updated list of projects the UT community has been working on.