Welcome! This project is about digitizing the Smith Family Papers collection, a collection that gives a perspective on Southern rural life in the 20th century, and through digitizing, we aim to create a widely accessible digital files for students and researchers to use for digital research.
Read more on the values, project members, and data management of this project
The majority of the contents of the Ellard-Murphree-Pilgreen-Smith Collection (referred to from here on out as the “Smith Family Papers”) includes letters, diaries, financial and academic records, wills, birth records. among family members and friends, with most letters from members of the Smith Family–Pauline and Sam H. and their children, Bernice, Christine, Martha, and Sam E (or “Sonny Boy.”). The geographic center of the collection is Pittsboro (or Calhoun County) Mississippi, where the family maintained their home since 1914, and where Pauline wrote most of her letters. Several letters from Jackson, MS are from Sam H. Smith, who was a state senator between 1932 and 1936. Letters to and from Columbus, MS are from Bernice, Christine and Martha, who each attended and graduated from the Mississippi State College for Women between 1931 and 1938. As Pauline and Sam H. grow older and continue to write from Mississippi, the children move around the country, and with a few military appointments, around the world. The letters reflect this.
Read more on the Smith Family members, or read more about the content of the letters.
For more context about the collection, watch an interview with Dr. Bridget Pieschel and Steve Pieschel, donors of the Smith Papers.
Members of LIB 201 and the Smith Papers Working Group at MUW Fant Memorial Library have worked in tandem to learn about the Smith Family and digitize this collection. With each of these steps, we use Asana to mark and track our progress. If you haven't been added to the Asana project, ask someone involved or email the project manager to get access.
Creating a Task in Asana
Each letter becomes a task in Asana, and each subtask tracks the progress of each step of the process of digitizing and uploading the letters to Athena Commons.
- Name the task using the mcj-dp018 convention used in the metadata
- Click on the name of the task to open it and click on the add subtask button
- Add subtasks titled:
- Metadata in Google Sheet
- Review metadata for quality control
- Transcribe/Add Tags
- Review Transcription and Tags for Quality Control
- Upload to Athena Commons
- Upload transcript to Athena Commons
As you work on each letter and complete these steps, assign it to yourself, then mark it complete when you're done so everyone working on the project has an up-to-date record of what progress has been made.
Involved in this process are these main steps:
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Scan the letters. This is done mainly with the Bookeye scanner in the Mims Digitization Lab, but the Epson scanner has also been used. Scanning also includes ensuring the quality of the digital image through cropping, deskewing, and image correction through color/light adjustments. The 3 files that are created are saved to the Archives hard drive, the LibArchives (R:) drive, and the shared Smith Papers Google Drive folder. The files that are saved from this are:
- a PDF user copy
- a TIFF archival copy
- a JPG for derivatives
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Create Metadata. The metadata standards for this collection are based largely on archival metadata schema, but have been tweaked to allow for anyone to assist with metadata entry. Some parts of the metadata require being present during scanning (e.g. Date digital, identifier, capture method, etc.), while other parts can happen after, during transcription (subject, description, etc.).
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Reading through the full metadata guidelines is recommended, but you don't have to memorize them!
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Enter the metadata into a sheet in Google Drive, which is divided up into decades for easier use.
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Transcribe. For this project we are using Transkribus to both transcribe and tag the letters. This software also has an algorithm (an HTR model, or "handwritten text recognition") that more easily recognizes the handwriting, so it reduces the amount of time spent on transcribing. Otherwise, transcribing can be done with a text editor like Notepad or Visual Studio Code.
- Before transcribing your first document, read through the Introduction to Transcribing Documents lesson. This explains things like methods for transcribing, how to use the software, and how to tag items.
- Deciphering handwritten can be difficult, so take a screenshot of something and share it with the Team if you're having trouble!
- Transcriptions are saved as .txt files and uploaded to both the Google Drive folder and AthenaCommons.
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Quality check. Since several hands - novice and expert - are involved in this project, it's important to share the metadata, transcriptions, and whatever other work you've generated. It's also important to remember that, even though consistency is key, this collection is so large and sprawling that perfection is not the goal! Aim for communication, consistency, and provide as much attention to detail as you can; but if you spend your time on one-word spelling errors or metadata quibbles, you'll never get passed one letter!
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Upload. While there are several uploads along the way (Google Drive and archives), the ultimate goal is to make the collection and its derivative files available to anyone. The ways we're currently doing that are through:
- AthenaCommons - our collection in the online repository, and
- CollectionBuilder - our exhibit of files in github.
Once files have been created and proofed, it's time to upload them! Once they're open and available, we can begin creating things with them. At this writing, we've created many artifacts (a network analysis of letter writers and people mentioned, map and a timeline of the TVA bringin electricity to the area, a text analysis of themes in the letters, and narrative project that combined these artifacts in a final portfolio.