University of Virginia Announces #Crowdsourcing Project to Transcribe the Papers of Civil Rights Icon Julian Bond

From the University of Virginia:

Civil rights icon Julian Bond fought for social justice and equality from the time he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 until his death in 2015. In between those years he served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, served as chairman of the NAACP, engaged in political activism on various fronts – and taught more than 5,000 students as a University of Virginia professor.

Now the University is embarking on a project to make his remarkable collection of documents accessible to the world through a crowdsourced transcription effort. #TranscribeBond is the first stage in the ultimate production of an online, digital edition.
UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies is partnering with the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, the Center for Digital Editing, the Scholars’ Lab and Virginia Humanities to launch the Julian Bond Papers project with a special two-day event, set for Aug. 14 and 15.
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Those wishing to participate, but unable to join in person, can still contribute remotely by accessing the project workspace on FromThePage when it goes live in August and engaging with the hashtag #TranscribeBond.
Transcriptions produced by this event and in the months following – all to be made available for public viewing – will be used in the development of the scholarly edition of “The Essential Julian Bond.”
It is no accident that the announcement of this project falls near the anniversary of Julian Bond’s death as well as last year’s tragic events of Aug. 11-12. In planning the transcription events, Deborah McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English and director of the Woodson Institute, said she hopes that the occasion will provide the broader community an opportunity not only to reflect on these anniversaries, but also to engage with the work and writings of one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement.
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For the last five years, the Woodson Institute has been working with the Small Special Collections Library to create a related online site, “The Movement in the Archive,” which began as a way to commemorate a series of 50th anniversaries, marking five pivotal years, 1963 to ’68, in the modern civil rights movement.
During his time on Grounds, Bond also co-directed the University’s “Explorations in Black Leadership” oral history video collection, which he, along with co-director and history professor emerita, Phyllis Leffler, also published as a book in 2014, “Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond.”

Read the Complete Announcement

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