Transcribing together

A crowd-sourced project launched by the Cambridge Digital Library (CDL) has helped to begin the task of transcribing the notebooks of leading historian and ecologist of British woodlands, Oliver Rackham, thanks to the generosity of an army of volunteers.

It’s March 2020 and Cambridge University Libraries have had to shut their doors due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Andy Corrigan, Digital Library Coordinator, and his team are looking for inventive projects and ideas that can be achieved remotely.

First launched in April 2020 with the aim of transcribing digitised material that does not have any existing research project to do so, the Transcribing Together project was kick-started with a collection of nearly 400 small notebooks used by ecologist Oliver Rackham.

Born in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1939, Rackham was educated at Norwich School, matriculated at Corpus Christi College in 1957, and was elected Fellow of the college in 1964. He would later serve as Master from 2007-2008. Although he began by studying physics, as a graduate student he turned his attention to botany, particularly the physiology of plant growth and transpiration.

Rackham was a prolific historical ecologist whose prime interest was the function, history, and management of British woodlands. He kept a series of notebooks, which he began during his youth and continued until his death, in which he recorded observations on plants seen in his home surroundings and on his travels, in addition to information about the weather and his college duties.

One of the distinctive features of Rackham’s work was its interdisciplinary nature, and particularly the way it related scientific observation to historic and cultural context, revealing the nature of man’s interaction with his surroundings.

In total, there are over 1000 notebooks in the Rackham archive which is housed in Corpus Christi College, 400 of which are already publicly accessible, with transcribers already working on them.

Currently the notebooks can be viewed on the CUDL alongside a sample of photos taken by Rackham.

“We are often approached by research projects who want to combine their research with digital images to create an online edition. Some of these have been working for many years and in great detail on their subject, often producing rich transcriptions of text-based objects,” said Andy Corrigan.

“But sometimes we work with a fantastic archive of material, such as that of Oliver Rackham at Corpus Christi College, which is catalogued and online but don't yet have a major project behind them to take the next step in enriching the data.”

Rackham’s red covered notebooks record his observations while observing the landscape and include sketches of plants and fungi. They form a chronological sequence, and were kept continuously by Rackham from his youth right up until his death in February 2015. They record observations on plants seen on his travels as well as in his home surroundings, as well as in college.

Rackham’s blue notebooks tended to contain more structured data in the form of tally charts showing incidence of plant species, as well as maps and tend to be more location-specific.

In addition, Rackham created an herbarium, collecting plant samples from all around the world. This is now kept at Cambridge University’s Botanic Garden, where it is being catalogued. 

When conducting fieldwork, Rackham would also take photographs to preserve a ‘snapshot’ of the particular location at a specific moment in time. These complement the written record kept in the notebooks, and the archive of his slides and prints is also kept at Corpus Christi College.

During the first year of the transcription project launching, page views were more than double that of any previous year and site searches relating to Rackham have also increased.

User engagement with the digitised notebooks has greatly improved, with 80% of users looking at more than one page (previously around 60%), and users looking at each page four times longer than previously, since the project began.

With over 300 notebooks to transcribe, the project is set to continue and more volunteers are welcome. Planned for later in the year are new additions featuring Rackham's descriptions of sites he visited in Greece (particularly the special site of Mount Athos) and Portugal. If you would like to contribute, you can find out more information on the crowd-sourcing project website.

“Being able to put all this online for the world is one thing, but to understand its context is something quite special, and that’s a fantastic demonstration of the benefits of 'the digital'," says Corrigan.