Papers of Thomas T. Eckert (1862–1877), an extensive and extraordinarily rare collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Cover of a U.S. Military Telegraphy ledger marked "Strictly private," Thomas T. Eckert Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Decoded telegram (top) from General Darius N. Couch, 3:10 p.m., Harrisburg, Pa., July 1, 1863, Thomas T. Eckert Papers. The four words "great battle very soon" were added by the telegraph operator and presage the Battle of Gettysburg. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Example of a coded telegram, Thomas T. Eckert Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Thomas T. Eckert's signature in a private code book, Thomas T. Eckert Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Title page of "Cipher for Telegraphic Correspondence," Anson Stager, Washington, D.C., 1861–62, Thomas T. Eckert Papers. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
The project aims to use crowdsourcing technology, in part, to spark curiosity and develop critical-thinking skills among students
SAN MARINO, Calif.— In a move to gain new insights into the U.S. Civil War, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced today the public launch of an innovative crowdsourcing project to transcribe and decipher a collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Abraham Lincoln, his Cabinet, and officers of the Union Army. Roughly one-third of the messages were written in code.
The Huntington is collaborating on the “Decoding the Civil War” project with Zooniverse (the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research), North Carolina State University’s Digital History and Pedagogy Project, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
“The Huntington and its partners are delighted to make this historic collection accessible to the public in a way that will help improve our understanding of this critically important period in our nation’s history,” said David Zeidberg, Avery Director of the Library at The Huntington. “This is a digital humanities project that holds the potential to transform our engagement with the past, inspire further research, and help students everywhere gain a better understanding of U.S. history, digital literacy, and the power of collaboration.”
The Huntington acquired the exceptionally rare collection of telegrams in 2012, composed of a nearly complete archive of Thomas T. Eckert, the head of the military telegraph office of the War Department under Lincoln. The archive was thought to have been destroyed after the war and includes crucial correspondence that has never been published. Among the materials are 35 manuscript ledger books of telegrams sent and received by the War Department, including more than 100 communiques from Lincoln himself. Also included are top-secret cipher books revealing the complex coding system used to encrypt and decipher messages. The Confederate Army never cracked the Union Army’s code.
The “Decoding the Civil War” project provides public access to digitized images of the telegrams and code books through the Huntington Digital Library (hdl.huntington.org). In addition, the project’s crowdsourcing website on Zooniverse (zooniverse.org), engages “citizen archivists” in the deciphering of the telegrams with greater efficiency and accuracy than could be accomplished by staff members at the partnering institutions.
“Crowdsourced digital projects involving transcription have begun to provide a tremendous opportunity for both institutions and interested citizens,” said Dan Lewis, chief curator of manuscripts at The Huntington. “The Smithsonian and the Library of Congress both have implemented projects that let ‘digital volunteers’ help make historical documents more accessible, to the benefit of the world beyond their walls. We expect this project to be similarly engaging for anyone interested in the history of the Civil War—and it’s accessible through just a few computer clicks.”
The project also provides a decoding activity for classroom students and museum-goers that is connected to Civil War milestones and provides inquiry-based educational modules that can be used to bring history alive. Through The Huntington’s partnerships with multiple Los Angeles area school districts and with North Carolina State University’s Digital History and Pedagogy Project, the educational modules will be integrated into teacher workshops reaching more than 1,000 teachers of at-risk students.
Built and managed by the University of Minnesota's Zooniverse team, the crowdsourcing project itself has three phases. “In the first phase, underway now, interested volunteers go online to transcribe the nearly 16,000 telegrams line by line, creating an extraordinarily rich database,” said Mario Einaudi, Kemble Digital Projects Librarian at The Huntington. In the second phase, volunteers will comb the database to identify significant people, dates, and times, enabling the creation of a robust search function. In the final phase, code books in the archive will be used to decipher the encoded telegrams, potentially providing fresh insights into the history of the Civil War.
People interested in participating in the project can go to its Zooniverse website at https://decodingthecivilwar.org/, take a brief tutorial that explains the process for transcribing a telegram, and find further information on the project. If participants are interested in joining discussions on particular telegrams, then they will need to create a user name and password by registering with Zooniverse.
The transcribed telegrams will be openly available to scholars and others interested in telegraphy, cryptography, wartime communications, technology, civilian-military relations, and many other aspects of the U.S. Civil War or American history more generally.
The project is partially funded by a two-year federal grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
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Contacts
Thea M. Page, 626-405-2260, tpage@huntington.org
Lisa Blackburn, 626-405-2140, lblackburn@huntington.org
About The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum—located in Springfield, Illinois—collects, preserves, interprets, and promotes the study of the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and Illinois history. More information about the institution can be found online at www.illinois.gov/alplm. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term project dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his entire lifetime (1809–1865). More information about this project can be found online at www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org.
About North Carolina State University’s Digital History and Pedagogy Project
The Digital History and Pedagogy Project is focused on the preparation of tools and resources for teaching and learning history in online environments. Project members create digital historical resources and, in the process, focus on best practices for using these resources in K–12 and college classrooms. More information can be found online at //dhpp.org/about.html and www.c3teachers.org/decoding.
About Zooniverse
Zooniverse is an online citizen science organization, founded in 2007, where project development is overseen by a collaborative effort between Oxford University in the United Kingdom, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. Zooniverse is the largest academic crowdsourcing organization, partnering with more than 400 academic, museum and library institutions around the world and with more than 1.3 million registered volunteers participating in more than 30 projects in the sciences and humanities. More information about Zooniverse can be found online at www.zooniverse.org.
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