Please note we have now recruited all of our expert volunteers – if you would like to get involved visit ‘stage 2’ below.

During the first stage in the process of transcription we will recruit a smaller group of ‘expert’ volunteers – people who have experience of working with early modern documents and handwriting and who have the ability and time to transcribe about 25 high quality digital images of pages from early modern wills.

We expect that a sample of 25 pages could take each volunteer about 18 hours, or 3 working days, work that we hope people will be able to fit in around other commitments across a longer time period. Ideally each volunteer would complete their sample transcriptions within a month of receiving their images. Volunteers will receive detailed instructions and guidance, including transcription conventions to follow. Most volunteers will transcribe directly onto an easy-to-use website called ‘Transkribus’ but other ways of working are possible if using Transkribus is impractical.

We will use these volunteer transcriptions to help ‘teach’ or ‘train’ a Handwritten Text Recognition software model to transcribe additional wills automatically. We can then apply the model to our whole sample, enabling us to auto-generate 25,000 will transcriptions.

Expert Volunteers will have the opportunity to participate in an online workshop, where they will meet the project Team and other volunteers, and discuss the research aims of the project and the wider potential of using wills.

The 25,000 will transcriptions generated by the Handwritten Text Recognition Software must be checked carefully for accuracy and will require correction. Fortunately the formulaic nature of wills (such as repetition of the term ‘Item I bequeath to’) means that we can auto-correct large parts of the text.

What we need help with are the less common words or sentences in the wills – for instance the names of people and places; amounts of money and the items bequeathed. A great benefit of our process is therefore that our volunteers’ efforts will be targeted at those parts of the wills that are most interesting to researchers.

What exactly will this larger volunteer community be doing? Volunteers will contribute to the project on the ‘Zooniverse’ platform. There volunteers will be shown images highlighting the words or sentences from the wills that need checking, alongside the auto-generated transcription that they will be asked to verify, correct or transcribe.

The Zooniverse Community will also be able to access instructions and advice and to see transcription conventions in the same place. We will also run a Forum that will allow volunteers to raise queries with the project team, or to chat with other volunteers about challenges or the interesting discoveries they have made. We plan to engage with our community not just by providing regular updates on progress, but also by setting transcription challenges and holding online and in-person ‘Transcribathon’ workshops where volunteers transcribe while learning more about the key research questions and aims of the project team.

Zooniverse volunteers will therefore be able to hone and improve their palaeography skills at the same time as making a contribution to the success of a cutting-edge research project. They will be able to contribute as much or as little time as is convenient, and they can fit transcription tasks in whenever they have a moment – on the bus or waiting for the kettle to boil. If you are bored of Wordle but have some knowledge of palaeography, then the Wills Project is just the thing!

Stage 2 hasn’t been launched on Zooniverse yet, but if would like to be alerted when the project goes live, please sign up to our mailing list and you will receive updates via email.