Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation frames digital archival transcription programs as spaces of interaction, and archival transcription as an authorial process. Digital volunteers’ editorial liberties challenge archival functionality, but they also provide opportunities for analytical and ethnographic insights.

Paper Abstract:

During the past twenty years – and spurred by dynamics emerging in the increasingly-digital post-pandemic world – crowdsourced transcription has allowed archives to better digitize and make accessible their materials while fostering greater public engagement (Van Hyning and Jones 2021). The online interfaces mediating these transcription projects warp participant roles for researchers, volunteers, and readers and, in doing so, both reflect and renegotiate stance between actors (Goffman 1979; Gershon 2010). Using a sociolinguistic frame of analysis, we can understand digital archives as spaces of interaction, albeit indirect, across space and time. In this paper, I survey a range of participatory digital cultural heritage archival projects and the ways that different actors—volunteers, archivists, and funding agencies—position themselves, or are positioned, interactionally within the archives’ digital systems. Through this lens, I argue for an understanding of archival transcription as authorship. The creative, curatorial, and editorial liberties taken by project volunteers may pose immediate challenges for practical archival work, but they also provide opportunities for analytical and ethnographic insights (Benoit III and Everleigh 2019). More simply, volunteers’ creative impulses are proof that archival participation works—that it generates the diverse perspectives and community engagement that are at its core.