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Civil War letters back in Iowa and ready for transcription

With almost 13,000 pages completed, our crowdsourcing volunteers are wrapping up their efforts to transcribe the UI’s collection of Civil War diaries and letters in order to make them easier to search and browse. But it turns out that that finish line is a moving target, since publicity from the project has attracted new CivilContinue reading “Civil War letters back in Iowa and ready for transcription”

The UI’s distance learning future that never was

A recent post at the Smithsonian’s Paleofutures blog — “A history of the future that never was” — cites the University of Iowa’s W9XK as the first American university station to broadcast TV. Read about this failed experiment to bring free education to the masses below. Predictions for Educational TV in the 1930s Today mostContinue reading “The UI’s distance learning future that never was”

THATCamping

This weekend the University is hosting THATCamp, an informal conference that brings together scholars, technologists, and librarians to discuss issues in digital humanities. Unfortunately we’ll be indoors, so no actual camping will take place. But on the bright side, our repeated viewings of 80s teen movies would indicate that spending the weekend together in theContinue reading “THATCamping”

Crowdsourcing continued

Expanding our manuscript transcription crowdsourcing site to include materials outside of the Civil War collections is taking longer than expected — apparently digitizing thousands of pages of manuscript cookbooks dating from the 17th century is not quite as straightforward as one would wish. But the scanning is finally underway, and we’re using the extra timeContinue reading “Crowdsourcing continued”