About
The Alvord Transcription Project is a multi-year project proposed by and headed by me as project director. It involves the scanning, digitizing, preservation, transcription, and statistical analysis of over 200 letters dating from the Civil War in the collection of letters relating to Rev. John W. Alvord.
Spanning Technology and Humanities
The Project is in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. It is a group effort involving a team of academics and students. It involves both computer science and statistical tools such as Python, Pandas, and Text Analytics/Natural Language Processing, as well as fields of the humanities such as historical interpretation and preservation, and tools and software from the digital humanities.
Background
This collection contains the private letters written by the Rev. John W. Alvord, a Civil War Army Chaplain and Freedmen’s Bureau Superintendent of Schools and Finance. Rev. Alvord was a significant historical figure best known for his Letters from the South, Relating to the Condition of Freedmen, Addressed to Major General O. O. Howard, published in 1870. The private, previously unpublished letters in this collection cover Alvord’s years as a field chaplain who traveled with the Army of the Potomac during its 1861-64 Virginia campaigns and his subsequent term as General Superintendent of Education for the Freedmen’s Bureau, ca. 1865-68.
Transcribing the Alvord letters has been a fascinating and enlightening experience for me.
Anna Dugan, Student Transcriber
My Role
- Applying for and managing grant funds
- Scanning, organization, and preservation of letters
- Hiring, training, and supervision of student transcribers
- Construction of public website for project results
- Statistical analysis and visualization of transcription text
251
collective hours of transcription work
Stage 1
The high-resolution scanning, organization, categorization, and archival preservation of the 200+ Civil War-era letters and historical documents in the collection.
Stage 2
The hiring of four student transcribers to assist in the transcribing of the letters and documents. Students are trained In collaboration with the Nau Center and IATH.
Stage 3
The resulting transcriptions, data, and reflections are hosted for educational use on a public website. Data is cleaned and available to download, as well as high quality scans of the letters and individual transcriptions.
Stage 4
The transcription data is analyzed using Natural Language Processing, text analysis, and statistical and visualization tools. This analysis and visualization is hosted on the website alongside the transcriptions.
Learn More About the Project
The Alvord Transcription Project involves academics and students from across different fields
