Chapman has collected a unique archive in the Center for American War Letters (CAWL). These letters were given to Chapman with the understanding that the letters would be used for historical scholarship. In order to fulfil the trust of the donors, Chapman has an obligation to make these letters as accessible to scholars as possible. As shown in the last year with Coronavirus, accessibility often means making things available online. Even in normal times, digitization makes documents more accessible to people with low vision and to people who cannot travel to California. For these reasons, the Center for American War Letters ought to be digitized.
Digitizing these letters is not simply a matter of scanning them and running an Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR is not a perfect transcription method even for printed books (Sullivan). The handwritten letters discussed here would need to be transcribed by people. This doesn’t necessarily mean the transcription would need to take place at Chapman, however; we could follow the example of Transcribe Bentham, and attempt a crowdsourced transcription. This would require high quality photos of the letters, and a way for people online to submit their transcriptions (Ross). However, these digital commitments would be very possible, and many projects have used them successfully.
Once the letters were transcribed, they would have to be organized. We must not underestimate the task of classification; organizing by year, war, or topic must all be considered carefully (Sperberg-McQueen). We must also consider the legal ramifications, and the ongoing costs, associated with digitization. As Roy Rosenzweig writes, a process must be developed on how to treat legal matters; should letters simply be purged if there are complaints? (Rosenzweig). Chapman also must allocate money for the upkeep of the project, or else it will decay (Nowviskie and Porter).
CAWL is one of the things that makes Chapman unique; increasing its digital footprint will increase Chapman’s visibility. It would be similar to the University of Michigan’s “Michigan in the World” historical project (Michigan in the World | U-M LSA History). The investment needed to digitize these letters would be worth it. On a personal note, when writing my undergraduate thesis, I could not access a document that was in England, and written in Latin. The digitization of this document saved my thesis. I know that digitization is difficult and expensive, but it is an important part of being a research institution at this time.
Works Cited
Michigan in the World | U-M LSA History. https://lsa.umich.edu/history/history-at-work/michigan-in-the-world.html. Accessed 14 Mar. 2021.
Nowviskie, Bethany, and Dot Porter. “The Graceful Degradation Survey: Managing Digital Humanities Projects Through Times of Transition and Decline.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 24, no. 2, June 2009, pp. 225–33. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1093/llc/fqp009.
Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” American Historical Review, vol. 108, no. 3, June 2003, pp. 735–62.
Ross, Claire. “Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement.” Digital Humanities in Practice, by Claire Warwick et al., Facet Publishing, 2012, pp. 23–45, https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.libproxy.chapman.edu/eds/ebookviewer/ebook?sid=5322476a-83c0-4a5d-a546-0dd1c3ab2a02%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&ppid=pp_23&vid=0&format=EB. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “Classification and Its Structures.” Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), by Susan Schreibman et al., Hardcover, Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
Sullivan, Danny. “When OCR Goes Bad: Google’s Ngram Viewer & The F-Word.” Search Engine Land, 19 Dec. 2010, https://searchengineland.com/when-ocr-goes-bad-googles-ngram-viewer-the-f-word-59181.