Posted by e.m.vine@exeter.ac.uk
23 October 2024We’ve recently announced an exciting new phase of the ‘Material Culture of Wills’ project – the launch of our Zooniverse site, a ‘crowdsourcing’ platform that is enabling us to involve hundreds of new volunteers in the project, working with us to transcribe our sample of 25,000 English wills made between 1540 and 1790.
Volunteering for the project on Zooniverse might be of particular interest to students who wish to improve their knowledge of early modern documents and/or their palaeography skills. Since our site contains transcription guidance and other aids it can also be a very effective teaching tool. To assist any tutors interested in using it in this way we’ve put together a seminar outline which can be used and freely adapted by anyone teaching early modern history, particularly if they explore wills or other personal documents, material culture, family history, palaeography, digital humanities, or public history.
The PowerPoint and seminar plan are in the Google Drive folder below and include seminar aims and activities, suggested reading, training resources and potential discussion points.
Link: Wills project seminar outline resources
Please do use these materials and share them widely, but we’d be extremely grateful if you could let us know if you do use or adapt them, or if you have any other feedback. For this, or any queries, please email Dr Emily Vine <e.m.vine@exeter.ac.uk>.