Description: People everywhere are helping the Smithsonian Institution Archives make more of its collections deeply accessible through helping transcribe field books, journals, and diaries in our collections.
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on