Before participating in transcribing documents on Douglass Day, I was unaware of what the Colored Conventions Project was. I not only got to experience something new for myself, but I was also so thankful to learn about such a good and cool thing. I learned that the Colored Conventions Project is a digital history and research project that focuses on recovering and sharing the history of nineteenth-century Black political organizing. Throughout history, Black voices have been silenced, and I loved experiencing being a part of something as amazing as what the Colored Conventions Project is doing. On Frederick Douglass’s birthday, participants celebrate by coming together to help preserve and transcribe Black historical documents in an event called the transcribe-a-thon. When I first arrived at the event, I didn’t really know what was going on until I heard my teacher say what to do. He said to sign up on a website called Zooniverse. I had some trouble logging into the website because so many people were transcribing and participating in Douglas Day. I overcame this issue by retrying signing up a couple of times, and eventually it worked. I then said something on the website that said “Douglass Day,” which I clicked on. It brought me to choose which state I wanted to transcribe documents from. Once I chose Pennsylvania, it brought me to the screen to transcribe. I then began typing in VS Code, which I would eventually copy and paste over to the website text box. I had never transcribed something before, and I actually really enjoyed it, which surprised me. When I began transcribing, I ran into a couple of problems with how to accurately transcribe. I was worried I would mess up the spacing, spelling errors, or certain extra text on the documents that weren’t clearly written in the main text. I overcame the issue by looking at the directions on the transcription page, which told me specifically how to go about these issues, which was really helpful. I transcribed one longer document and one shorter one before I ran out of time. The longer document seems to be from the proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Color. The shorter document is a fragment of political resolutions from a Colored Convention in 1884, where African Americans held meetings to organize politically after the Reconstruction. These documents were published to discuss ideas about education, civil rights, abolition, and Black self-organization among free Black communities in the 1800s. I used AI to help me identify where these documents came from because I couldn’t figure that out on my own.
There were at least around thirty people in the room I was in, and a live stream with a chat where people could communicate and also come together from all around the world to recover Black history together. During the live stream, they not only discussed the event, but they also did certain things to celebrate the day. They did things like sing the happy birthday song to Frederick Douglass, reenact speeches, and had birthday cake. The room that I was in also had a birthday cake at the front of the room for people to eat if they chose. They were saying on the live stream that they were breaking records with the amount of participation in the event this year. Nearly 7,800 people participated in the event this year from all around the world. That is such a huge number of people coming together to make a difference. Engaging with archival documents during the transcribe-a-thonon Douglass day made me see history with a different perspective. It made history feel more immediate and human. Instead of looking at history using textbooks or stories told by outsiders, I was seeing history with primary sources and firsthand documents. It made me feel more connected to that history and to the people behind these documents. It was also interesting seeing the different uses of language that people had in different time periods through this experience. It wasn’t just the history that I found enlightening about this experience; it was also the collaboration that such a large group of people had during this event. I always find it so beautiful when so many people come together to do something, especially when it’s something so impactful like this. Making Black history more accessible and visible is so important, and participating in such an event was such an amazing experience. It is such a cool thing how many people came together for this event, and I loved being one of them.
