The American Soldier

Sample Assignment for Students

The American Soldier project has been incorporated into several undergraduate courses. Students find the work to be challenging but very rewarding. Reading another person's handwriting requires patience, especially if you are unaccustomed to reading cursive. What soldier could have anticipated that someone would be reading their handwritten comments some 70-plus years after the fact!

Students who have transcribed and annotated these documents comment most frequently on how eye opening they are. It doesn't matter how little or how much they already know about World War II either. Most World War II accounts are censored, whereas these aren't. You'll find that they provide a truly unique perspective, with the effect of humanizing a war that often overwhelms the imagination by its immensity. People are no longer numbers in a statistic.

We believe your students will be impacted as ours have been. The course you offer doesn't have to be in history, nor does the subject need to be World War II. These commentaries touch upon 20th-century American history more generally, race and class, upon gender relations, medicine and health, leadership, education, democracy, governance, so on and so forth.

Keep in mind that these documents are uncensored. They convey the felt experiences of soldiers who are preparing for, are in, or have been in combat and/or some other war-related service role. Below is a general assignment that can be customized to fit your classroom needs, objectives, and infrastructure. For instance, in 16a, we provide only a general reflection prompt. You may want to offer more specific guidelines based on the type of course you teach or the level at which you teach. You may also wish to direct your students to a specific scanned microfilm roll. (For a list of scanned ARB rolls, and those that have been completed, see Results. We intend in the the future to offer additional customized assignments.)

Digital History Project: The American Soldier

For this assignment, you are going to work with primary sources from The American Soldier in World War II, a historical digital project which is designed to raise public awareness on the experiences of World War II American GIs. By transcribing and annotating documents composed by these service members, you will help enter voices from the past into the historical record. Along the way, you will gain hands-on training in documentary editing and the digital humanities. In this exercise, you are being asked to transcribe and annotate 10 handwritten documents. Read through all the instructions before starting the assignment.

Getting Started

1. The first step is to go to the project's Zooniverse site and register for a free account: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tkotwim/the-american-soldier.
2. Once you are ready to begin, return to The American Soldier homepage, scroll down to the active rolls available for transcribing, and select one that interests you. You may also click on the Classify tab to be assigned a random document (known as a subject).
3. When your first image appears, click on the Tutorial and familiarize yourself with the workflow tasks you are expected to perform for this specific document. It will also be useful to consult the Field Guide located on the right margin of the screen, where you will find transcription guidelines, FAQs, and lists of common military abbreviations and acronyms. You can check the Tutorial and Field Guide again at any time during the process. If you encounter technical issues or have any additional questions, right-click on the Talk tab and open the page in a separate browser window or tab; here you can report problems or post questions, which support staff will address as quickly as possible. You can always open the project site in a new browser window or tab and work on another document in the meantime.

Annotating Documents

4. Begin by identifying the document type, which will typically correspond to how many questions or the sorts of questions the survey contains. It is extremely important that you designate the correct type of document; otherwise, the workflow tasks will not match your assigned image. If you make a mistake or pick the wrong document type, you can always simply click the Back button to return to previous screens.
5. You will now be guided through a series of questions that ask you to annotate the document. This usually entails identifying answers to specific survey questions or entering serial numbers or other codes that appear on the image.

Transcribing Handwritten Responses

6. The next step is to transcribe the soldier’s handwritten response to the survey question(s). Feel free to pan, rotate, zoom in and out, or invert the image color as needed so that the text is clearly visible. These options are available by clicking icons along the right or bottom-right margins. Accuracy is a critical aspect of your grade! The idea here is to replicate the entry as closely as possible, retaining the original sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling (including misspellings).
   a. If you need to add any missing words or punctuation to improve readability, click Insert at the appropriate spot in the text and put these additions inside the square brackets that appear [like this]. Anything that the soldier did not write needs to be enclosed in these square brackets.
   b. If a word is illegible, click on Unclear. If you are unsure about a particular word, you can also click on Unclear and type what you think it is in the square brackets followed by a question mark (e.g. [truck?]). Make sure to insert Unclear for each and every unreadable word.
   c. If you think the author has made grammatical mistakes that hinder readability, transcribe the mistake, then in square brackets after the error insert the correction (e.g., "Rosevelt [Roosevelt]). This may be useful where the error refers to a name, location, or event. Use this option sparingly.
7. When you are done you will be presented with a final Your summary page, that includes all of your work. DO NOT CLICK NEXT YET!
   a. Open a word-processing file on your computer, and copy and paste Your Summary into this word-processing file; then return to the Zooniverse website;
   b. Click on the Talk button. You will see a Subject number at the top of the page; copy and paste this subject number into the word-processing file under your transcription summary;
   c. Right click on the image you just transcribed, and copy then paste the image into the word-processing file, after the summary and subject number.
8. Save the file, to record your work, but before moving on to the next transcription, you will want to start a Collection to keep track of your work. See below.

Organizing Your Personal Collection

9. While on this Talk page, click on the small icon below the scanned image (to the right) that looks like a bullet-point outline ().
10. You will now Create a new Collection. For the Collection Name, use your own first and last name and add a description; also select the Private option" before clicking Add Collection. Your first transcription has now been added!
11. Next, scroll down below the document image and enter a 1-2 sentence description summarizing the content of the response into the text box under Leave a note about this subject. Copy and paste the description into your word processing file under the corresponding transcription for that document image.
12. Now index the document by entering at least 3 relevant hashtags (e.g., #racism) into the text box. As you type, the system will generate suggested topics automatically; you may choose one of these or create a new topic. If the response contains 3 or fewer sentences, you only need to enter 1 hashtag. In any case, copy and paste each hashtag into your word processing file below the description for that document image. Make sure to save your work before moving on! Once you are done indexing the document, click Add Comment.
13. Before moving forward, go to your user profile in the top right-hand corner and select Collections. On the following screen, click on the thumbnail for your personal collection. When that page opens, go to Collaborators and enter your instructor's username into the field. Check the Viewer box and click Add User Role.
14. Repeat steps 4 through 13 for each subsequent document until you have completed 10 transcriptions to receive full credit. Also, if any handwritten response is less than half a page, you must transcribe an additional response of comparable length. If you are concerned about the quality of your transcriptions, you can always do more of them to bring up your grade.
15. When you have transcribed the required number of documents, go to your user profile and click Your Stats. Here the number of documents you transcribed will be tallied as “classifications.” Take a screenshot of the webpage and insert the resulting image into a word processing file. Make sure that both your username and the number of classifications are clearly visible in your screenshot.

If you forget to add a completed transcription, don't worry; you can always add transcriptions to the collection afterward, by clicking on the Recents tab on the top right. The documents you have transcribed will appear as thumbnails. At the bottom of the thumbnail image, you will see two small icons. Click on the one that says Collect (the small bullet-point icon). When the entry window opens, follow the steps to create or add the transcription to your Collection for this class.

Sharing Your Results and Experience

16. Return to the domain for The American Soldier, click on the Talk tab, and scroll down to General Discussion on the subsequent page. Click on New Discussion.
    a. When the field opens, take some time to compose a one-page reflection describing what you learned and found interesting about the project. This response will also factor into your grade. Title your reflection using the name of this course (e.g., VT HIST 3544).
    b. Once you have written your post, copy and paste the text into the word processing file, placing it beneath all of your document images and transcriptions you have completed. Then return to the site and submit your post on Zooniverse by clicking Create Discussion.
17. Next, go back to the discussion board and read through a few of the reflection pieces posted by your classmates.
    a. Pick at least two of these responses, preferably ones that relate to your own experience, then compose and submit a 1-paragraph comment for each post. Remember: these comments and the reflection piece will factor into your overall grade.
    b. When you have finished entering comments, copy and paste the text for both of them at the way end of your word-processing file. Make sure to save your work!

Once all of these steps have been completed properly, submit your word-processing file to your instructor. After that, you’re all done!

Rubric

Annotations	10%
Transcriptions	40%
Descriptions/Indexing	10%
Reflection	25%
Comments	15%
TOTAL	100%