PRINT Crowdsourcing Transcription System.

The Crowdsourcing Transcription Platform is a web application that invites the public to help transcribe historical handwritten documents, making fragile and hard-to-read manuscripts accessible to everyone. Sponsored by Dr. Rosalind Beiler and Dr. Amy Giroux, the project addresses a long-standing bottleneck in historical work: handwriting in old documents is often difficult to decipher, and transcribing it by hand is slow, expert-intensive labor. By opening that task to volunteers, the platform gives the public a meaningful way to engage with history while freeing scholars to focus on larger research. The application guides contributors through a tiered workflow—transcribers convert handwriting to text, editors review and refine it, and encoders tag people, places, and organizations using internationally recognized standards—with each document moving smoothly through these stages toward a finished, searchable record. A side-by-side image viewer and a rich text editor make the work intuitive for newcomers and experienced users alike, and built-in teaching resources help anyone get started. The result is a tool that turns mass collaboration into preserved, digitized public history—easier to search, share, and study for generations to come.