So long, summer! Hello, fall!
The intrepid Summer 2017 Aperio team celebrated in style last Tuesday, commemorating the regular meeting day for the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore with a cold (but very classy) supper of relishes, salmon in aspic, a salad, chocolate and raspberry pie, and a cheese plate adorned with fresh figs and almonds. Chin-chin!
What did we accomplish? Over 10 weeks this summer:
- 1700 pages of minutes transcribed
- 5 notebooks of membership dues and lists, covering the entire 30 years of club existence, deciphered and organized into a spreadsheet showing who belonged when and where they lived;
- 650+ programs (of ~1000) transcribed and entered into spreadsheet;
- Domiciles of members from 1890-1895 plotted onto a huge 7’ x 7’ map recreated from the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps;
- 42 blog posts, ranging from a few hundred to 2000 words each
It’s quite a body of work. But I won’t lie– we were a bit dismayed when we realized how much work is left to be done.
For one thing, we need to organize and put into a reasonably readable form all of the transcriptions we compiled this summer. For another, we need to make these documents accessible to the spring 2018 class that will be reading, editing, and analyzing these documents. Luckily, Clara will be doing an independent study with me this fall to do just that!
But the biggest body of work is to transcribe the remaining minutes— about 2400 pages’ worth. Based on the rate at which the team members were able to transcribe this summer (3 of the 5 team members spent the majority of their time transcribing minutes, while two focused on programs and the membership logs), we have somewhere in the neighborhood of another 800 hours of transcription left to go. If we can divvy up this labor among more hands, it will go faster.
Luckily, Friends School has come to the rescue! During both the fall and spring semesters, history teacher Josh Carlin’s senior seminar will be joining the team, transcribing documents and (I hope) continuing to blog about their discoveries. Clara, Hunter, and I met Elizabeth, Alex, and Sanny at Friends School last week and they have already started transcribing. We’ve created a special transcription site (https://loyolanotredamelib.org/Aperio/WLCB/)where you can see what the minutes actually look like– as well as some of the finished transcriptions. We’ll be continuing to populate the site throughout the year with more things to transcribe and more completed transcriptions. And if you’d like to join us in this, let us know and we can add you to the team.
We are planning a crowd-transcription session at the Bmore Historic Unconference on Friday, Sept. 29. We’ll probably be there during at least the morning sessions if not all day. If you’re interested in Baltimore history, historic preservation, or museums, you should come. We’d love to see you there!