{"id":694690,"date":"2026-03-31T11:27:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/694690\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T11:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:27:15","slug":"found-in-translation-chicago-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/694690\/","title":{"rendered":"Found in Translation \u2013 Chicago Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading between the lines is a handy talent, but sometimes the lines themselves require deciphering. Case in point: Newberry Transcribe, an ongoing project at the Newberry Library. The independent research library on the Near North Side has undertaken a massive crowdsourcing initiative: using volunteers to help transcribe handwritten documents in its holdings to create a more useful digital repository. Sounds straightforward enough, but the process of transforming the chicken scratches of yesteryear into readable text is a challenge, especially for young scholars unpracticed in cursive and shorthand. Documents from a century ago can be as indecipherable as Egyptian hieroglyphics, so it falls to boomers, Gen Xers, and similar elders to serve as living Rosetta stones.<\/p>\n

The project is focused on the library\u2019s modern manuscripts and archives\u00a0collection\u2009\u2014\u2009over 15,000 linear feet of manuscripts, correspondence, journals, photographs, and other materials. Thousands of pages have been digitally scanned, but the challenge is to make these documents more accessible to scholars and the general public. \u201cOnce we started putting handwritten documents online, that opened up access for everyone around the world,\u201d explains Newberry librarian Jen Wolfe, who leads the project. Scans are great, but they aren\u2019t searchable. \u201cThe act of using the papers [as images online] was kind of the same as what you would do in person\u2009\u2014\u2009examining each page, one at a time; each researcher doing the work of deciphering them from scratch.\u201d Better than nothing, but not very efficient.<\/p>\n

The Newberry started transcribing manuscripts into searchable text in 2013, during the Civil War\u2019s sesquicentennial, concentrating on letters sent during that four-year conflict. But the project really took off during the pandemic. \u201cPeople were looking for something meaningful to do, and that\u2019s when we launched our transcription crowdsourcing effort in earnest,\u201d says Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry\u2019s curator of modern manuscripts and archives. The library reached out to the public through its website, newsletter, and mailing lists. \u201cIt got a really fantastic response,\u201d Hinderliter says. The project currently has 146 registered volunteers, but thousands of others have come and gone over the years.<\/p>\n

At the Newberry, \u201cmodern\u201d covers a bigger time period than you might think. The trove of manuscripts includes writings from as early as the 17th century through the present day. These documents are stored in a building next door to the library. Wolfe and Hinderliter show me the merest sliver of the collection, arranging several letters, diaries, photos, and the like in a small meeting room at the Newberry. Some of the more fragile and valuable documents are protected by plastic sheeting, but most can be handled with clean, dry hands\u2009\u2014\u2009no gloves required. History at my fingertips.<\/p>\n

Many of the documents have a Chicago connection, including materials related to luminaries like novelist Sherwood Anderson and a personal hero of mine, screenwriter and director Ben Hecht. (I was asked if I wanted to hold one of Hecht\u2019s Oscars. You damn betcha.) Lesser-known local litterateurs are also represented, like Jack Conroy. \u201cHe\u2019s a super interesting guy,\u201d says Hinderliter. \u201cA friend of Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He wrote a proletarian novel in the \u201930s called The Disinherited before The Grapes of Wrath was published. A very funny and witty letter writer as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

I am confronted with a page of script that\u2019s simultaneously cramped and loose. Only every fourth word or so is decipherable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Just as entertaining are the letters Conroy received, not least from Algren. One\u2009\u2014\u2009sent from Chichicastenango, Guatemala\u2009\u2014\u2009features a poem in Algren\u2019s hand on torn, yellowed paper. Here the gritty scribe behind A Walk on the Wild Side and Chicago: City on the Make writes a 14-line stanza beginning with \u201cBingo Bango Bongo \/ I\u2019m in Chichicastengo [sic]\u201d and ending with \u201cBest from Nelsonango \/ To Jackson Conroybango.\u201d Another, employing language best described as both salty and greasy, details Algren\u2019s feelings about Hollywood and Otto Preminger, the director who made the movie version of his The Man With the Golden Arm.<\/p>\n

Algren\u2019s correspondences are at least semilegible. The same can\u2019t be said for Sherwood Anderson\u2019s. While his short stories were lucid, his handwriting was not. \u201cEspecially with his diaries,\u201d says Wolfe, adding that he was likely writing entries only for himself. That doesn\u2019t excuse the scrawling script appearing in his nondiary writings as well. Shown a letter that Anderson wrote on hotel stationery, I am confronted with a page of script that\u2019s simultaneously cramped and loose, and only every fourth word or so\u2009\u2014\u2009largely determiners and prepositions like \u201cthe\u201d and \u201cof\u201d\u2009\u2014\u2009is decipherable. I find myself losing the plot in the middle of a single word. Hinderliter directs me to one particular sentence: \u201cHe says, \u2018I am becoming more and more a communist.\u2019 But it\u2019s not super clear that\u2019s what it says at first glance.\u201d Nor at my second or third glance. Even after I\u2019ve been told what it says, it still looks to my eye more like \u201cThis becoming recess and need seance a paramecium-ist.\u201d Sister Rosalyn, my handwriting teacher at St. Damian, would\u2019ve been appalled.<\/p>\n

Poor penmanship is vexing, but shorthand is a whole other language. These days, the use of phonetic symbols to take dictation and document proceedings in real time is practically extinct, replaced by voice recording and AI transcribers. It\u2019s rare to find someone trained in shorthand. Compounding matters, there are multiple systems. The Gregg and Pitman ones show up most frequently in Newberry documents.<\/p>\n

Gregg, created in 1888, is probably what most people think of when they think of shorthand\u2009\u2014\u2009if they ever do. Pitman was created earlier, in 1837, and was quite popular in the 19th century. Used by reporters to transcribe the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it turns up often in the Newberry\u2019s collection of Civil War diaries. \u201cThose are just so enticing,\u201d says Wolfe. \u201cIt was always frustrating that we had these Pitman Civil War diaries that we could not make heads or tails of. When you look at them, it really looks like aliens wrote it.\u201d Fortuitously, a mother-daughter volunteer team who knew Pitman and Gregg, respectively, stepped up.<\/p>\n

\"LibrarianLibrarian Jen Wolfe, who leads the Newberry Transcribe project. <\/p>\n

For the materials in foreign languages, the library finds translators, but handwriting remains a challenge to read whether it\u2019s in English, Spanish, or even Latin. \u201cWe have a book of magical spells from the 1600s, and some of it was in Latin,\u201d says Wolfe. The author of that book, what the library has labeled Newberry MS 5017, was unknown until 2017. That\u2019s when transcriber Renae Satterley, a librarian at Middle Temple in London, recognized 17th-century attorney Robert Ashley\u2019s handwriting from his vita and the notes he made in the margins and on the endpapers of the books in his massive collection. Ashley was no pointy-hatted sorcerer (though a portrait shows he favored flowing, lawyerly robes): While some of the spells purportedly help the caster speak with spirits, they\u2019re mostly geared toward relief from toothaches and other ailments.<\/p>\n

In recruiting transcribers, Wolfe and Hinderliter promote the pleasure of reading direct accounts of history\u2019s eyewitnesses. For example, Wolfe points out the library\u2019s collection of firsthand tellings of the Great Chicago Fire, permitting me to peruse Julia Newberry\u2019s private diary. She was the daughter of Walter L. Newberry, a Chicago alderman and later president of the Chicago Board of Education who made his fortune in real estate, railroads, and banking and stipulated in his will the provision of funding for the \u201cfree public library\u201d that bears his name.<\/p>\n

Julia\u2019s October 13, 1871, entry, rendered in impeccable cursive, is stark, revealing her shock and horror, still palpable more than 150 years later: \u201cI am perfectly bewildered with the rush of events, I don\u2019t know what to write or what to think. Half of Chicago is in ashes it is too awful to believe, so dreadful to think about. And the suspense is so fearful, the reports so vague & no one can get direct information.\u201d Says Wolfe: \u201cReading about someone who saw it firsthand\u2009\u2014\u2009it makes it more vivid and accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinderliter has special affection for diaries from attendees of the World\u2019s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Conventionally, most of what we know about the fair is based on PR materials and newspaper accounts, brimming with boosterism. But diaries of attendees put you in the shoes of people who were often seeing the White City for the first time. For instance, Miss Jane Elliott Sever O\u2019Reilly, writing to her mother in July 1893, seemed starstruck: \u201cThe first thing we saw upon entering the city was the \u2018Ferris Wheel.\u2019 It towered above everything.\u201d Enchanted by the fair\u2019s endless strings of newfangled electric lights, Jane wrote, \u201cIt seemed as if we must be in Fairy land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AIn this 1932 letter, Chicago novelist Sherwood Anderson declares his communist leanings, but his handwriting is tough to discern. <\/p>\n

Transcribers are free to pick whichever documents they wish to work on. While some hop around, others stick with particular collections. \u201cWith family papers, you can watch someone grow up through their letters to other family members,\u201d Wolfe says. Simple children\u2019s correspondences, rendered in giant block letters, evolve over time into neatly handwritten notes sharing news about entering college, getting married, becoming a parent, and other milestones. \u201cAnd then, eventually, it\u2019s someone else talking about their death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Volunteers call up documents through a portal and type them up. Their work is then reviewed by other participants. The volunteers are a mixed bunch: retirees; visiting scholars; students, ranging from high school to postgrad; and a legion of various other types. \u201cIt\u2019s a good way to teach working with primary sources\u2009\u2014\u2009giving newer scholars ownership or agency with the research,\u201d says Wolfe. \u201cThere are people who go crazy and just do hundreds of pages, or people who pop in every once in a while. We don\u2019t know a ton about them, because we don\u2019t require any sort of login. We want to make it as accessible as possible and have a low barrier to entry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebecca Rector is a retired librarian in upstate New York. She had her own business offering genealogy research, but that took a hit when the COVID-forced closure of libraries, courthouses, and other archive locations made such fact-finding nearly impossible. Then she heard about the Newberry project. \u201cI have Midwestern roots\u2009\u2014\u2009born in Ohio\u2009\u2014\u2009so I thought this would be interesting. It was, and still is!\u201d Rector tells me by email. \u201cI am familiar with old handwriting, so doing the transcriptions was a great way to spend time during the pandemic.\u201d Rector continues to transcribe not only for the Newberry but also for the National Archives and assorted New York museums.<\/p>\n

Newberry transcribers may skew older, but there are younger participants, too. Markens Desir of New Jersey is a volunteer transcriber for the Newberry and the Library of Congress\u2009\u2014\u2009when he\u2019s not attending high school. Desir, 17, has a special appreciation for the papers of Chicago lawyer and civil rights activist Mark J. Satter. Asked by email what keeps him typing, Desir displays an admirable earnestness: \u201cThese transcription campaigns feel like a real world and high-stakes investigation for me. It\u2019s my own little way of creating world-scale impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the reality of how history is preserved, one document at a time, a painstaking process of deciphering and transcribing. But the way Wolfe sees it, there\u2019s plenty of fun in it, too\u2009\u2014\u2009especially if you enjoy a challenge: \u201cIf you run out of Wordles, we have an endless supply of word puzzles for you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reading between the lines is a handy talent, but sometimes the lines themselves require deciphering. Case in point:…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":694691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5124],"tags":[290845,290851,290839,32348,196835,960,36515,75081,290846,290844,62392,290854,7823,290833,70627,290835,290838,6211,50868,96341,176456,33818,18807,189193,290837,14107,5386,1818,290841,290855,109441,7492,13711,25444,290862,290861,178143,290859,218544,65347,184061,401,405,290832,290836,1573,290847,2136,290853,290860,86462,188478,290840,290852,58235,290849,290842,290843,290848,290834,290850,290856,290858,290857],"class_list":["post-694690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago","tag-a-walk-on-the-wild-side","tag-ai-transcribers","tag-alison-hinderliter","tag-archives","tag-ben-hecht","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-board-of-education","tag-chicago-stories","tag-chicago-city-on-the-make","tag-chichicastenango","tag-civil-war","tag-civil-war-diaries","tag-covid","tag-cursive","tag-diaries","tag-digitize","tag-egyptian-hieroglyphics","tag-english","tag-ferris-wheel","tag-gen-xers","tag-great-chicago-fire","tag-gregg","tag-guatemala","tag-gwendolyn-brooks","tag-handwritten-documents","tag-hollywood","tag-il","tag-illinois","tag-jack-conroy","tag-julia-newberry","tag-latin","tag-letters","tag-library-of-congress","tag-lincoln-douglas-debates","tag-mark-j-satter","tag-markens-desir","tag-midwestern","tag-miss-jane-elliott-sever-oreilly","tag-national-archives","tag-near-north-side","tag-nelson-algren","tag-new-jersey","tag-new-york","tag-newberry-library","tag-newberry-transcribe","tag-ohio","tag-otto-preminger","tag-photos","tag-pitman","tag-rebecca-rector","tag-richard-wright","tag-rosetta-stone","tag-sherwood-anderson","tag-shorthand","tag-spanish","tag-st-damian","tag-the-disinherited","tag-the-grapes-of-wrath","tag-the-man-with-the-golden-arm","tag-union-soldier","tag-voice-recording","tag-walter-l-newberry","tag-white-city","tag-worlds-columbian-exposition-of-1893"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}