DIY History

Collections Opened to Research

• Civil War diaries and letters helped launch the project and demonstrated the value of public transcription for handwritten historical materials.
• The Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks opened rare recipe books to food historians, researchers of domestic medicine, and public humanities audiences interested in historic cooking and household life.
• The Hevelin science fiction fanzine collection supported research into early fan culture, amateur publishing, speculative fiction networks, and the development of twentieth-century science fiction.
• Medieval manuscripts and translation workshops extended the project’s public humanities work beyond transcription alone. These efforts invited participants to engage with manuscript culture through translation, interpretation, and close reading, connecting rare materials with students, scholars, and community audiences.
• Iowa Women’s Archives, NAACP newsletters, pioneer letters, and political papers helped bring visibility to sometimes overlooked community histories.

Institutional Influence

DIY History’s open-source approach and transcription workflows influenced projects at institutions including the Library of Virginia, Yale University, the University of Oxford, the Newberry Library, Maynooth University, the National Archives, Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Waring Historical Library, the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Carnamah Historical Society in Australia.

Evolved from a customized Omeka and Scripto setup to a custom software architecture, establishing a reusable public transcription framework adopted by cultural heritage and educational institutions worldwide.

The Library of Virginia’s Making History: Transcribe project was especially direct in its adoption, modeling its site and workflows on DIY History’s Scripto/Scribe-based approach.

Scholarship, Teaching, and Public Humanities

DIY History became a recurring example in scholarship on crowdsourcing, digital history, participatory archives, library innovation, and digital pedagogy. It appeared in or informed work published through venues such as the Journal of Digital Humanities, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, College & Research Libraries News, the Digital Library Federation Forum, and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.

The project was also discussed in larger studies of public participation and historical research, including Making Digital History: The Impact of Digitality on Public Participation and Scholarly Practices in Historical Research, Crowding the Library: How and Why Libraries Are Using Crowdsourcing to Engage the Public, The Participatory Digital Library: A Crowdsourcing Case Study at the University of Iowa Libraries, and Internet Reviews: Crowdsourcing in Libraries and Archives.

In the classroom, the Archives Alive! curriculum used DIY History as an alternative to disposable coursework. Students transcribed primary sources to contribute to a lasting public resource, while leveraging those documents to build skills in research, rhetorical analysis, and multimedia presentation.

Public Reach

DIY History reached audiences far beyond the academy, drawing attention from Reddit, BuzzFeed, CNN Eatocracy, Wired, Atlas Obscura, and NBC News. These moments helped bring new volunteers to the work and showed that archival transcription could become a form of public participation, not just institutional processing.