Statement of Purpose

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The purpose of Phase 2 is the creation of consistent, uniform metadata, in specifically defined fields to enhance the ability to search across the corpus of the telegrams.

In Phase 1 of Decoding the Civil War, citizen historians transcribed and helped to create an open source access to a large, rare collection of Civil War telegrams in The Thomas T. Eckert Papers that are held by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The work also drew upon the support and expertise of four organizations — The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; the Papers of Abraham Lincoln at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; North Carolina State University; and Zooniverse with its team at the University of Minnesota. The project was funded by a two-year grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Building on the hard-earned transcripts from Phase 1, we are asking, in Phase 2 of Decoding the Civil War, our volunteers to work with individual telegrams, identifying specific metadata such as the sender, recipient, date sent, time received, etc. The tagging of individual telegrams by the citizen historians will eventually enable specific searches to be done across the almost 16,000 telegrams. Researchers will then be able to find all the telegrams to, say, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, no matter whether it is in Ledger 2, or 6, or 22 and is addressed in the telegram to “SecWar”, “EMS,” or simply “Stanton”.

The outcomes of this project will be made available through:

• This site, a web-based interface developed by Zooniverse to provide access to images of each telegram in the Eckert Papers (this interface will be maintained after completion of the project);
• The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, through the Huntington Digital Library and educational modules, providing unlimited and perpetual access to the digital images and transcriptions for scholars, students, and the public at large.