18thConnect’s Typewright, which is used to correct deficient OCR transcription of printed texts, works in a similar way. Both tools allow us to use modern technology to provide greater access to older items.

I don’t keep track of every collaborative project on T-PEN, but I can speak to the ones with which I have been in direct contact. There is first the Carolingian Canon Law Project at the University of Kentucky, which was one of our major use case testers during development. Alongside them were about four major collaborative projects organized by Stanford University Libraries for their SharedCanvas project: they involved manuscript studies on Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Medieval French MSS. (all of them used T-PEN), and brought together scholars from the US, Canada, England, France, and the Czech Republic.

More recently, Nathalie Rothman at the University of Toronto has been using T-PEN to transcribe some 17th century Ottoman chancery documents. There is the Amelia Chesson Diaries project out of Northwestern University. Adrian Wisnicki at Indiana University of Pennsylvania is working on an edition of the diaries of Sr John Franklin and is using T-PEN for the initial transcription (and putting us to the test with such challenging manuscripts!).

There is also Massimo Lollini’s Open Petrarch Project at the University of Oregon, which is using T-PEN to transcribe some major manuscripts of Petrarch as well as beautifully illustrated, early printed book (John Russell can tell more about this wonderful project). Finally, Benjamin Albritton (Stanford) is leading a team working on the musicological texts of Guilliaume de Machaut.

Those are the ones I know about. I tend not to pry into the other projects that we host: we aim to respect each scholar’s privacy and no one should feel that they have someone looking over their shoulder as they work.

That said, T-PEN fully supports crowd-sourcing transcriptions should that be anyone’s interest.

Can you say more about the kinds of collaborations underway?