Final Service-Learning Project
William Ward
HIS3600_CMB-25Spring 00251
Professor Farless
4/18/2025
The service journal series has been a major benefit for my future in the history field. It truly gives us a chance to experience and work with history like that of those already in the field. I worked with the Library of Congress on their By the People project. I didn’t do much at first nor really get into it but as I kept going and getting it done for my time logged, I realized just how amazing and impactful it really is. You got to really see the mindset of the people at the time from their personal and private written accounts and letters. I can glimpse articles that may have never been ever used for academic papers being able to transcribe and tag the information on them really means the work I did there may be seen in future academic papers and journals.
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Along with this the process really got me thinking about the future of this specific type of field. Digitizing archives and creating backups available online for anyone to view for free is a necessary step to make my knowledge available to all. But one of the key issues is the struggle to transfer some of the more damaged documents and all the complicated cursive writing. I struggled on some and some of the more unique cursive volunteer sections despite being open for a long time yet to be finished. I got to thinking if modern technology such as AI would be able to help us with this process. I experimented with using the AI programs free with UCF to test that and didn’t see much success. That is where I realized something By the People has probably hundreds of thousands of unique cursive documents and their printed transcripts, we may see in the future people creating AI’s using that data specifically to make transcription easier. As it is, when I look around for my future degree, a master’s degree in public history, I have noticed that some programs offer double degrees in public history and another in information technology. Maybe the future in this field of history lies in technologies yet to be born.