Education
The People's Contest Digital Archive presents an opportunity for educators. History classes can engage more deeply with life in the Civil War era through transcription of the materials in the archive. As transcriptions are published and made available online, viewing the transcriptions alongside the digital materials can assist in understanding the accounts and making them legible.
Text analysis and encoding of transcripts (e.g. to draw out personal names or place names) can also provide an understanding of the networks and travel patterns in which people engaged during the mid-19th century.
We hope to develop open educational resources concerning the materials in the People's Contest soon, using transcription activity and the transcripts themselves as the basis for them. The project website contains several thematic essays using the diaries and journals to draw out particular topics of interest throughout the archive.