Thanks to our incredible volunteers, we have now successfully transcribed over 65,000 four times. That's 1/4 million individual submissions to the project! Thank you so much--we couldn't have done this without you.
FAQ
What is the objective of this project?
The American Soldier in World War II is a project to make available to scholars and to the public a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and military service by American soldiers who served during the Second World War.
Why are these documents being transcribed?
Approximately 65,000 images of handwritten survey responses are included in this collection, which was digitized by the National Archives from scanned microfilmed rolls in 2017. The project team is using Zooniverse to transcribe the entire collection. By making these sources text searchable, and thus internet accessible, the Zooniverse community will write these tens of thousands of personal expressions of soldiers into the historical record.
How will these transcriptions be used when they are completed?
The transcriptions will help a team at Virginia Tech create a digital archive that will reunite these handwritten reflections with corresponding surveys and other documentary materials from the U.S. Army Research Branch, using machine learning, topic modeling, and other natural-language processing and computer visualization techniques. We want to reconstitute the most comprehensive portrait of the largest army in U.S. History. Completed transcriptions will be ported back into the National Archives Catalog as well to encourage wide distribution.
Who will be interested in these documents?
We believe these unique historic sources will be of interest to a wide public audience. Our team will be working with a professor of history and social science education at Virginia Tech, Dr. David Hicks, to craft lessons for teachers to engage their students in primary-source analysis of wartime experiences, using these handwritten reflections. Our project director is working with the director of Florida State University’s Institute of World War II and the Human Experience, Dr. Kurt Piehler, to encourage university and college professors to take a digital approach to the study of World War II, war, and society. We see our target education audience reaching into university classrooms as well as K-12 classrooms. The breadth and originality of the information our digital archive will contain will attract scholars and researchers, too, among them historians, scholars of American studies, military studies and military history, African American and gender studies, psychiatry, and various behavioral and social sciences. Above all, however, we imagine that our digital archive will be used by your average Americans with an interest in World War II, likely because they know something about a relative who served, but they want to know more. This project is being built for you.