Update 5/15/2020: In just three days, a group of volunteers from around the world transcribed more than 1,300 letters (almost 2.000 pages), mostly handwritten, sent to Orson Welles and his network CBS in the wake of the infamous 1938 War of Worlds radio broadcast.
______
By RAY KELLY
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — home of the world’s largest collection of Orson Welles papers — has embarked on project to introduce a storied moment in his remarkable career to a younger generation.
But they need your help.
The university’s Special Collections — Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers is readying the archive of audience mail sent to Welles following the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 for use in the classroom. The handwritten letters have been digitized, but many are cursive and need to be transcribed by volunteers online so they can be more easily accessible to students from middle school through college years.
Volunteers will be asked to log-in to a Zooniverse website, which allows the university to post a large project like this that needs help with transcription.
Justin Schell, director of the Shapiro Design Lab at the University of Michigan Libraries, explained the process to Wellesnet.
“Each page will be transcribed by at least five different people on the Zooniverse platform and there are mechanisms so that once a volunteer transcribes a page, they won’t see that specific page again, ensuring that no one person could transcribe a single page five times,” Schell said. “Once the page has been transcribed by five different people, it is ‘completed’ and will no longer be shown to volunteers. The progress of the project’s completion can be viewed on the front page of the project. After all of the pages are completed, the project team chooses a ‘final’ version of each line on each page that will then go into the digital database.”
Schell noted that handwritten letters present challenges on multiple levels.
While the technique of optical character recognition (OCR) can work fairly well for printed text, it is less reliable for accurately “reading” handwritten text, he said.
“Humans are much better at reading and transcribing manuscripts that are handwritten,” Schell said. “The other challenge, though, is cultural and generational, as cursive handwriting is taught less and less in schools, it may be harder for younger volunteers to read and transcribe the letters. We do have an option to mark something as ‘unclear,’ so the research team will know to look specifically at that section of the page.”
The trove letters is familiar to scholars like A. Brad Schwartz, who cowrote a documentary about the War of the Worlds broadcast for the PBS series American Experience in 2013 and went on to author Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News two years later.
However, using the vintage letters as a modern-day classroom tool is something totally new and was the brainchild of Philip Hallman, curator of the Screen Arts Mavericks & Makers Collections.
“It was my idea to try and make available the letters to middle school and high school students following a series of emails I received from teachers after the PBS program War of the Worlds was broadcast celebrating the 75th anniversary of the show,” Hallman said. “Individuals will come to use the collections but they are using the documents to write their own books or articles. This is the first time we’ve used the Welles collection as a teaching tool beyond connecting it to a film studies type teaching approach.”
He added, “These letters serve as an introduction to how one goes about doing primary source material research. But they have lent themselves to being used in a variety of ways beyond that. The lessons plans we developed allow teachers to approach introducing primary sources from different starting points or with different end goals in mind. On one hand, they can be used to show how democracy works and the need for the public to participate in citizenship. It’s important and necessary for the public to share their opinions on topics so that elected officials understand what the public is thinking. These support that approach. Someone could use them to teach history of the 1930s and how the public was thinking about the threat of war in Europe. Others could use them to teach the history of mass communications, in particular radio. Or the way in which journalism has evolved and what stories triggered nationwide interest. They can be used to teach literature and adaptation of a novel to a different media.”
Hallman has already tested the materials in a high school classroom with the help of Karl Sikkenga, an administrator at New School High in Plymouth, Michigan. He used the letters in an American history class for high school freshman and sophomores.
“It fit pretty seamlessly [into the curriculum] in about three different ways. One was that we use all kinds of primary sources,’ Sikkenga said in a recent university podcast. “We try to look at history from many different perspectives rather than a conventional, kind of birds-eye view of the whole picture, so that’s one thing. Another is having multiple sources about a single event, and so these primary sources that the library provided us with ranged from irate letters, to letters from school kids, to newspaper articles, to analyses, and we also used excerpts from the broadcast itself. And then the third piece is the way that media functions, in particular War of the Worlds, was important because it was a common experience that thousands of people were having simultaneously, and of course, in the present day, millions and millions of us have simultaneous experiences, but this was something that was really only being generated in that part of the century.
* * *
Those interested in taking part in transcribing the letters may obtain more information at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/jmschell/my-dear-mr-welles-war-of-the-worlds-fan-and-hate-mail
__________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.