Arturo Schomburg’s 150th birthday was celebrated this past January 24 in a manner the bibliophile would have truly appreciated.
Schomburg is known for having traveled the world to create a 10,000+ African diaspora art and book collection that was purchased by the New York Public Library in 1926. His collection is today known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
On January 24, the public was invited to take part in what was billed as “Transcribe-a-thon: Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” which had folks volunteer to type up some of the letters and documents from the “Arthur Alfonso Schomburg papers.” Schomburg’s personal collection contains nearly 25,000 pages of digitized documents. The event, put together with a $120,000 National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)-Mellon Grant, is one of several the Schomburg Center plans on holding over the next two years to help preserve Schomburg’s collection for the future.
Some 40 people signed up to take part in the Schomburg Center transcribe-a-thon. At Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, undergraduate students registered in classes to work on the transcripts. After his collection was purchased by the NYPL, Schomburg was invited in 1929 to help set up Fisk’s library. Transcribing took place in both Tennessee and New York and both events were broadcast via Zoom, so that teams could see and talk with each other while doing the work. “In doing this, we’re making transparent the very valiant and tangible connections Schomburg had with both institutions,” Barrye Brown, the Schomburg Center curator leading the transcribe-a-thon told those in attendance. “I’m so happy that you’re all here, all part of this today: part of helping us really bring this history alive.”
Laura Helton, a University of Delaware history professor who is serving as a scholar on the digitizing project, noted that while her students tend to think that everything is already online, there are over 11 million documents in the Schomburg Center and only a fraction of them are available digitally. “It takes a lot of human labor to turn things into digitized resources that are easy to access,” she said. “You are today making Schomburg’s papers more accessible. … His handwriting in cursive was not too easy to read and humans are much better at reading this than machines are. So, we need an accurate transcription of these documents so that they will be eventually fully searchable in the digital collection that we’ve been building.”
A few of the volunteers at the transcribe-a-thon said they had done transcriptions at their places of employment or for personal reasons, so this was nothing new to them. Yet most attendees said they were in no way professional transcriptionists: it’s just that they had seen the advertisement for the event on the Schomburg Center’s webpage in late December and jumped at the chance to contribute. “We wanted everyone to be able to participate as long as they are willing to try to interpret the documents,” Dr. Helton told the AmNews. “We have some people in the room who can read cursive and that’s great. That’s helpful to us. And folks who transcribe letters in French: that’s useful too. But really anybody can join in.”
Brown added that there were no barriers preventing someone from signing up and joining the transcribing event: “That’s one of the beauties of being at the New York Public Library, there are really few barriers to accessing information. That’s really one of the important reasons why Schomburg placed his collection here at the library. Because in order to access any of our collections, you only need a library card and anyone around the world can get a New York Public Library card for free. So, anyone can access our collections and the riches that we have here, anyone can learn more about any culture of the African diaspora, the history of the African diaspora. That is why we’re here.”
Participants were encouraged to do their best but to not be too concerned if they thought they were not completely accurate. The documents being transcribed would ultimately be crowdsourced, which means that even if one person got part of a transcription wrong, they would not be the last person to see the document before it goes online. The same document was due to be worked on by more than one volunteer and the combined transcriptions would be compared, with disagreements flagged and resolved before the final transcription is approved.
“I fully appreciate the honor it is to contribute to this,” Satneith, a high school science teacher working on a transcription, said. “No one else can do this. Like if we don’t do it, no one else is going to do it, right? So that’s why I’m here: I’m like, if I could contribute a teeny-weeny bit of information for some other generation to combat the ignorance, you never know.”
Vanessa K. Valdés, author of “Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg,” explained the reasons why she came to the transcribe-a-thon: “Because this is his birthday. Because of the significance of his 150th, this is the 150th anniversary of Schomburg’s birthday, and so this is a major milestone. But also, what I appreciated about this particular activity is that this is so in keeping with who he is, meaning the building of community, the strengthening of community.
“The opportunity for us from all different backgrounds––people who are in the academy and professors and scholars and folks who just love him and love Black history––who are in this space together and learning about him and helping to transcribe his papers, helping to make these papers more accessible. That’s why I decided to be a part of this activity. Yeah.”
The January 24 Schomburg Center transcribe-a-thon was the pilot event for digitizing the Arturo Schomburg papers. By the end of the day, 383 transcriptions were completed in both Harlem and Nashville.
Organizers say they plan on doing another, larger transcribe-a-thon next year and that it could possibly even have an added online component.