The Smithsonian's crowd-sourcing transcription project!

The Smithsonian has developed a really cool crowd-sourcing project to help transcribe objects and records in their vast collections!  The most recent project involves the Martin W. Gorman Collection of plant specimens collected in Alaska in 1902.  The Smithsonian Collections Blog tells you all about this newest component of their transcription project.

You can read more about the transcription project here.  The software is incredibly easy to use and there are a number of different collections exposed for transcription.  The painting diary of American Modernist painter Oscar Bluemner, a scrapbook of early aeronautica collected by William Upcott, and  Charles Henry Hart's American artists autograph collection are just a few of the transcription projects grouped under "The American Experience."

I jumped right in and tried my hand at transcribing a clipping from December 1836 with the headline:

MR MONCK MASON'S ACCOUNT OF THE AERONAUTICAL EXPEDITION.
FROM LONDON TO WEILBURG.

It was an absolutely fascinating and poetic description of a balloon voyage.  Here's a lovely paragraph from the account:

"The scene itself was one which exceeds description.  The whole plane of the earth's surface, for many and many a league around, as far and farther than the eye distinctly could embrace, seemed absolutely teeming with the scattered fires of a watchful population, and exhibted [sic] a starry spectacle below that almost rivalled in brilliancy the remoter lustre of the concave firmament above.  Incessantly during the earlier portion of the might, ere the vigilant inhabitants had finally retired to rest, large sources of light, betokening the presence of some more extensive community, would appear just looming above the distant horizon in the direction in which we were advancing, bearing at first no faint resemblance to the effect produced by some vast conflagration, when seen from such a distance as to preclude the minute investigation of its details.  By degrees, as we drew nigh, this confused mass of illumination would appear to increase in intensity, extending itself over a larger portion of the earth and assuming a distincter form and a more imposing appearance, until at length, having attained a position from whence we could more immediately direct our view, it would gradually resolve itself into its parts, and shooting out into the streets, or spreading into the squares, present us with the most perfect model of a town, diminished only in size, according to the elevation from which we happened at the time to observe it."

I encourage you to try your hand at transcription!