Project history

§3 Before discussing the successes and challenges of phase two, however, it is important to contextualize this period of the CTP. In 2010, the project’s leaders, Peter Robinson and Barbara Bordalejo, moved the project to Canada when Robinson took up a post as a professor in English Literature at the University of Saskatchewan. Bordalejo and Robinson had plans to develop a new platform to carry the project forward. These plans ultimately resulted in Textual Communities. Textual Communities (TC) is an online textual editing environment developed by Robinson and initially funded through a CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund and a SSHRC Connection Grant for “Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing,” both granted in 2012. In 2014, Robinson received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the second phase of the CTP and began transferring the project to the TC environment in preparation for a larger effort to complete the transcription process. This required adding more manuscript images to those the project had already collected, uploading all project images to TC, and aligning the lineation of a base transcription of the text with the corresponding images. From the development of TC onwards, all transcription on the project has been facilitated by that editing environment as our team continues to work towards the goal of transcribing and proofing nearly 30,000 pages present in 88 pre-1501 witnesses. The vast scope of the project is an ongoing challenge, but the transcription team has completed over 7000 pages of transcription since phase two began in 2010 (Nelson and Robinson Forthcoming, 11).

The Canterbury Tales in context with other projects

§4 Ours is hardly the first project to deal with and report on the issues that arise when running large transcription teams. Both the Estoria de Espanna and Transcribe Bentham Projects have detailed and examined their experiences (University of Birmingham 2019, University College London 2010). The former is a project ultimately aimed at transcribing and collating the 39 manuscript witnesses of the 13th century chronicle by Alfonso X of Castile, while the latter project seeks to transcribe the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. However, our circumstances are slightly different from those projects. For example, the experience and build of our team is different. Transcribe Bentham relies upon crowdsourcing for its transcriptions and, although Jeremy Bentham’s hand can be difficult to transcribe and changes over time, its transcribers need to learn to identify only a single hand writing in modern English (2010). Estoria de Espanna’s transcribers face a challenge much more similar to our own —they must identify and transcribe multiple hands of medieval Castilian—but they also use a large body of crowdsourced volunteers to prepare transcriptions at different levels (Duxfield 2015). Whereas Transcribe Bentham relies heavily upon crowdsourced labour for all its transcription, Estoria de Espanna sees this labour as only an initial step in preparing transcription for paid transcribers:

In short, we are optimistic that with careful and specific strategies in place to work towards its success, crowdsourcing will enhance and facilitate rather than replace our own in-house produced transcriptions. (Duxfield 2015, 138)

The CTP, on the other hand, has not utilized crowdsourcing. While we have allowed and encouraged small contingents of students and volunteers to participate in the project, crowdsourcing requires that “anyone can sign up, regardless of prior qualifications or experience” (Duxfield 2015, 138). Crowdsourcing is a valuable tool for many large projects without significant barriers to entry, such as Transcribe Bentham. However, our experience tells us that the specialized task of transcribing texts that require training in Middle English paleography, and of encoding those transcriptions in accordance with the demanding conventions developed by the CTP, requires a level of instruction that excludes crowdsourcing. The CTP’s transcribers need to be able to decipher multiple Middle English hands and to have a basic understanding of coding to properly annotate the manuscripts. Instead, our project has depended predominantly upon a relatively small cohort of paid transcribers and volunteers who are often trained as part of a class or workshop prior to working on the project. This is not to say that every transcriber on the project is an expert in Middle English palaeography or even a medievalist (far from it). In fact, some of our very best transcribers have been non-specialists. Still, each of our transcribers has required a varying degree of hands-on initial training, ongoing support, and solicited guidance that would be very difficult to replicate in a crowdsourcing environment. When we have taken on people who have not received any previous training, they initially work closely with senior project members (which we discuss in detail below) before they begin submitting pages on their own. This is an important difference from our counterparts: Polly Duxfield has written extensively about the experiences of the Estoria de Espanna Project, as have Tim Causer, Melissa Terras, Kris Grint, and Anna-Maria Sichani for Transcribe Bentham, but both tend to focus on the retention and recruitment of crowdsourced labour or the process of transcription and guidelines more than the practice and structure of their work with paid transcribers (Duxfield 2018, 48–52; Causer et al. 2018). That said, there are still many corollaries between our own experience and those described in these articles and we frequently contextualize the CTP in light of these other important projects below.

The functionality and features of the textual communities environment

§5 Before discussing the nature of the project’s structure and management in more detail, it is useful to describe the editing environment that facilitated our work, Textual Communities. Bordalejo and Robinson’s decision not to develop a transcription environment dependent on existing technology (e.g. the Wikimedia software used by Transcribe Bentham) allowed the CTP to create an editing environment that serves its specific needs, with the trade-off that it would have to develop features freely available to other projects developed on pre-existing software (e.g. Transcribe Bentham’s “Transcription Desk” and “Benthamometer”).

§6 Textual Communities has existed in two versions. The first iteration of TC was built using an open-source platform called LifeRay, which facilitated many features no longer available in the present version such as the chat, wiki, and bulletin board features. However, the project stopped using LifeRay’s services for several reasons. Firstly, the project became aware of serious security flaws in LifeRay, leading to considerable amounts of time having to be spent identifying and remedying breaches. Secondly, there were problems with the login and user authentication procedures which appeared insoluble in the LifeRay environment. These difficulties were exacerbated by the withdrawal of support by Google for the fundamental software support underlying LifeRay, when it cancelled its “Google +” social media effort (compare the similar effect on the development of the CantApp when Adobe withdrew support of PhoneBuild, [North et al. Forthcoming]). Simultaneously, the project came to realize that the relational database backend to the first version of TC could not provide the performance required for a live editing environment, and its developers (Robinson and the programmer Xiaohan Zhang) decided to move to a JSON document database backend.

§7 Development on the new TC began in 2014. This was somewhat akin to rebuilding an aeroplane in flight, and it was not until 2018 that the new system was ready, and all existing transcriptions moved to the new system. This change came with some costs. Because the new TC environment focussed on the core tasks of the project (transcription, collation, analysis and publication) it did not attempt to replicate the social media tools built into LifeRay. These tools were either replicated outside TC (thus the Wiki and Chat) or dropped. Two casualties were the bulletin board and ability to compare transcriptions in the viewer page (discussed in more detail below).

§8 The ongoing development of the Textual Communities environment gave our transcription team the opportunity to engage and experiment with these various features. The loss of certain features, such as the chat function, were negligible to the CTP’s progress and day-to-day operations because third party software (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Discord, Slack, etc.) provide equal (and sometimes better) functionality at no cost. Likewise, there is little difference now that the TC and CTP wikis, rather than being features of the editing environment itself, are now housed as spaces on the University of Saskatchewan’s Wiki Service (Robinson 2018, Robinson 2020a). In both these instances, transcribers still retain access to the tools that Textual Communities no longer provides directly: transcribers still communicate with their supervisors and one another using chat systems and the entirety of the wiki is freely accessible in its new location through a link within the TC interface.

§9 One lost feature with clear advantages gave users the ability to compare transcriptions. A user could simply choose two transcriptions in the viewer that would appear side by side and the system would highlight sections where the transcriptions were different from one another. The compare feature was particularly useful for troubleshooting errors in the XML tagging that prevented the transcription from rendering properly. Missing tags become obvious when highlighted in juxtaposition to the most recent functional version of the transcription.

§10 Another feature that showed initial promise but that we have unfortunately lost in TC’s second version is the bulletin board. This feature was essentially a forum into which transcribers could upload images of and comments on particularly difficult transcription problems for discussion and resolution among the project community. The thread of discussion then became not only a reference for transcribers who encountered similar problems but a crystallized example of how our project considered and worked through unanticipated questions of our transcription practice as the bulletin board became a sort of informal research log or journal for special cases. Moreover, the discussion threads were an accessible way for members of the transcription team to learn about our transcription principles in a participatory way and clarify their own understanding of the project. Its role as a hub for the community made the bulletin board a feature that benefitted new and senior transcribers alike. While it may be possible to recover past posts—a recovery well worth the effort as the bulletin board provides insight into the project’s day-today operations—the CTP still needs an easily-accessible, transparent platform to replace the bulletin board.

§11 An important feature present in both iterations of Textual Communities is a versioning system that records the activities of its users. Every action a user takes in the system (e.g. saving a change, submitting a transcription, approving a transcription, etc.) is recorded and attributed within TC. The CTP can use this system to be more transparent, held more accountable, and to give credit to individuals for the work they put into the project. Thus, the project publications built on the TC system will give the names of every transcriber who worked on any page of transcription. This can be seen in Thomas Farrell’s forthcoming edition of the Tales of the Reeve and Cook. The project leader can then also look at important metadata about the amount of time spent on each transcription, the number of pages each person has transcribed, and how the project is progressing overall.

§12 It is useful to note that, while the bulletin board and versioning system both record the contributions of individuals, each serves a very different purpose. The versioning system is really about acknowledging who made specific changes to any given transcription on the project in a comprehensive, quantitative manner for the sake of credit and accountability. The bulletin board, on the other hand, contains (some) deliberative conversations that took place as evidence of why the transcription team chose to transcribe a specific instance in a certain way. In other words, the versioning system serves as a comprehensive research log while the bulletin board was a limited research journal. Such a frame should demonstrate how the loss of the bulletin board is regrettable given our project’s goals, but loss of the versioning system would be fatal.

§13 Finally, the most important feature of Textual Communities for the purposes of our transcription team and this paper has been in place since April of 2018 and remains an integral part of the CTP’s transcription workflow. The supervisor’s interface (and the backend it gives users access to) allows Textual Communities to facilitate and streamline the workflow and exchange between supervisors and transcribers on the transcription team without resorting to external emails (Figure 1). Whereas transcribers have only the options to “Save,” “Submit,” or “Preview” their transcriptions, supervisors can additionally “Commit,” “Message/Reassign,” and “Approve” these transcriptions. Under this feature, when transcribers submit their work, an automated email notifies their supervisors of the submission. The supervisors can then review that work and choose to approve the transcription if there are no errors or reassign the submission with a message that details the errors still present in the transcription. The system then sends that message to the original transcribers in an email that both notifies them that their work has been reassigned and what they need to do for that transcription to receive approval. Supervisors also have the ability to make small changes themselves if they deem the errors too minor to warrant sending the page back to the original transcriber. When a supervisor approves a transcription, Textual Communities forwards the page to the project leader in much the same way as it does with a transcriber’s work. The project leader then reviews the page one last time before committing it to the system as ready for collation.

Figure 1

The Supervisor’s Interface on the Viewer of the Textual Communities Environment.

§14 This workflow is far better than the system of emails that existed before it. In the earlier system, each transcriber would have to write and send an email from their own account to a supervisor and the messages did not have the uniformity they do now. A supervisor would likewise have to compose many emails. Worse, transcriber emails from multiple accounts could sometimes get lost. The new system sends all correspondence through a single, easily searchable email address. Beyond the benefits of an automated system that saves time for both transcriber and supervisor, the new interface is more organized as well. Each folio page and its place in the transcription workflow is recorded and displayed for each user in that user’s member profile (Figure 2). One can even enter back into the viewer to transcribe or review a specific transcription by selecting its link in the list on the member profile page. While a straightforward addition, this simple interface and the programming behind it have been the greatest improvement to the project’s efficiency and workflow for the transcription team.

Figure 2

Member Profile Page for a Transcription Supervisor in Textual Communities.

§15 While some of these features were more successful than others, reflecting on each helps us to understand just how the project and its members function. In particular, it brings into focus our nature as a community that requires opportunity for intellectual exchange and discourse as part of our work, a need that many of our best features have aimed to meet and make more efficient. This is not something one would necessarily assume of work that can be done in isolation like transcription. However, the social element of our work on the CTP is essential to its success. For instance, our most efficient and skilled transcribers have consistently been project members who attended meetings regularly and actively participate in deliberating problematic cases either by helping new transcribers or discussing difficult issues with project leaders. In addition to this productivity, the sense of community also aided in keeping the overall goals of the project in the forefront of transcribers’ minds. While the ability to work on much of the day-to-day transcription in a purely isolated and individual way can be a positive facet of transcription work, this same isolation can narrow the focus of the task at hand to the point that one becomes disconnected from the larger picture of the project as a whole. A focus on community helps to remind each of us that our individual pages should not be considered in isolation but as a part of a much larger project doing considerable research.

Project pedagogy: Training the transcription team for CTP phase 2

§16 One of the interesting challenges the project faced was how to get transcribers of various different specializations and backgrounds up to speed about the overall purpose of the CTP and the role transcription plays in the larger project. Transcribers were sometimes senior undergraduates who had taken a course in digital humanities, MFA in writing students, MAs in English, or doctoral candidates who study medieval literature. The varying levels of background required us to develop training materials and practices that ensured every transcriber knew enough to be a productive member of the team without overextending our senior project members. We also had to make sure not to presume our transcribers had greater knowledge than they really did while expediting their training so that they could contribute to the project. Training tools such as sample pages, wikis, and quizzes supplemented the face-to-face training of supervisors as a means to efficiently bring our team up to speed (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Current Transcriber Training Workflow.

§17 Transcriber training begins with an in-person meeting where a project leader or transcription supervisor provides a general introduction to the project. Locally, this usually entailed a one-on-one meeting with a new employee (though this interaction could sometimes take place during the group meetings, described below). However, a large enough group of new recruits could result in a small workshop similar to those delivered abroad (see §23–26 below). Some of the most important training for our transcribers was quite general compared to the niche details of transcription practices one might expect us to prioritize. For instance, it became important to make sure each transcriber had a proper understanding of our ultimate aim of collating electronic transcriptions as it illustrated the different degrees of significance for certain tasks. Otherwise, as occurred in one instance, a transcriber might sometimes agonize over representing minutiae that would be regularized during collation but miss an entire word in the same line instead. Proper context of the larger task at hand is paramount for a transcriber’s success.

§18 Generally, we explained the basics of the project to each new transcriber: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales exist in various manuscript witnesses from the Middle Ages and most modern editions work from a select few copy texts. We instead seek to collate that manuscript tradition in its entirety. From this explanation, a brief discussion of the collation process and the project’s earlier work with phylogenetic software was usually enough to give transcribers an idea of why and how their work matters (Barbrook et al. 1998). In other words, they were ready to practice transcribing. At this point, the supervisor will display a sample transcription and explain the basic practice of transcription, the meanings of TEI and XML, how our transcription works, and introduce the new transcriber to our transcription guidelines. Once the new transcriber has read over the “Quick Start Guidelines” and “Full Transcription Guidelines,” they are ready to take the transcription quizzes.

§19 One of the first tools we implemented for transcriber training was an online transcription quiz still available at the University of Saskatchewan Wiki (2020) website. Once transcribers had read over the guidelines and had a chance to consider how they might implement those guidelines in practice, the quizzes—one introductory and one more advanced—provided a low-risk context in which we could make sure new transcribers understood the most rudimentary aspects of transcription. The questions ensured comprehension of fundamental practices such as that an abbreviation tag (<am>) should have a corresponding expansion tag (<ex>) or that we record “ff” at the start of a word as a capital “F” (Robinson 2020b). Rather than having to wait for the transcriber to encounter a particular problem out in the wild or having them transcribe another entire practice page when all we wanted was to test their knowledge of a single instance, the quiz allowed us to cover many issues in a format that generally takes the transcriber only a short time and delivers the correct answer. We found the quizzes particularly useful in environments where multiple new recruits were taking the quiz and an authority on the project was available to provide clarification for transcribers’ misconceptions and generate discussion among transcribers about where their intuition may have led them astray.

§20 After a new recruit has finished the quizzes and demonstrates an understanding of their content in the subsequent discussion, we then assign him or her a practice manuscript. This practice manuscript is part of a separate community in TC called “CTP Training”. This community contains a single “manuscript” called Sample Page that is merely 399 iterations of the same practice folio (Hg 223r) and we assign an iteration for each new transcriber to practice on. This system has several advantages: first, we can choose a page that the project leaders have considered in advance. They can select an example that has a diverse range of common and challenging transcription problems that require consultation of the guidelines. We can also be sure that the folio is an appropriate challenge level for a beginner. Our current practice folio requires a new transcriber to encode an ornate capital, a header, some of the most common abbreviations found in the manuscripts, and even a straightforward use of the <app> element (see Bitner and Dase 2021, §22–29). Moreover, this strategy allows us to train new employees more quickly, as we have an answer key to their first transcription and can point out any serious issues before they begin independently transcribing material.

§21 Once a transcriber has taken the transcription quiz and perfected the practice folio, we begin assigning them manuscript pages. At first, we assign a small batch of four or five folios because, just as with the practice folio, we want to catch any of the new transcriber’s errors before they transcribe a large number of folios. Our supervisors try to review and give feedback as quickly as possible on these first transcriptions since we only begin assigning new pages to a transcriber after their supervisor is satisfied with and has approved those initial pages. In some rare cases, if a transcriber is having an especially difficult time, they may repeat this step with another small batch of transcriptions. Generally, however, there is a smooth transition from this step to our regular process of transcription and revision. A supervisor tries to keep in mind a transcriber’s level of experience and review transcriptions in a timely manner. Ideally, a paid transcriber will eventually become well trained enough that they can either become a supervisor or submit their transcriptions directly to the project leader.

§22 While this is our current training process, it was not our first iteration nor will it necessarily remain unchanged. For instance, we experimented with different training periods for transcribers throughout the project, beginning with more attentive transcription supervision for our earlier employees and reducing that training period as we took on more transcribers. The first new transcriber, working under the supervision of a doctoral student, submitted nearly 100 pages for revision before submitting his work directly to the project. Part of the reason this transcriber was subject to such scrutiny was that the full quiz and practice pages were not yet in place and his supervisor wanted to be sure his work was accurate. With no official method in place, ongoing supervision seemed the most plausible route. Still, this was likely overcautious and subsequent transcribers had somewhere between a third and half as many pages checked with the meticulousness that initial training requires, pending their performance on transcription they had already done.

Workshops abroad

§23 In addition to managing a local team of transcribers along with volunteers from abroad, our project has also delivered workshops at other academic institutions for students and faculty interested in working on the CTP. In our most recent workshop, delivered at Duke University in September 2018, we taught approximately fifteen senior undergraduate and graduate students in collaboration with their Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The training provided in these workshops is a condensed version of the training we give all of our transcribers which is then followed up through online correspondence.

§24 First, the participants learned the basics of our transcription guidelines and our team led them through a tour of the features available on the TC environment. Once participants became familiar with the interface and the guidelines, we ran through some examples of challenges they might face during transcription while fielding any questions they had. At this point, we gave the participants the same quizzes we normally use to train our transcribers as mentioned above (see §19 above). After the participants receive their results, we discuss the correct answers and the specific transcription challenges the questions are meant to raise before turning to the practice transcription (see §20). At this stage of the workshop, participants often begin to work in collaboration with one another, helping one another with the transcription. Once again, we go over this transcription practice as a group and use it as an opportunity to clarify any ambiguities that participants might still have about the guidelines. Finally, we provide the participants with a few uncurated pages to transcribe while we are present to round out the workshop and continue to field questions and review their transcriptions through a combination of e-mail and the TC environment.

§25 The structure of this workshop is designed to optimize the face-to-face time between workshop coordinators and new transcribers in order to properly train the transcribers and weed out the most common and problematic errors. We generally encourage these cohorts of satellite transcribers to meet with one another once a week in the same way our own group does to support one another in their transcriptions and build a sense of community. Since the content is all accessed online, the meetings can be as formal, or informal, as each group feels is necessary. For the University of Saskatchewan cohort, a Facebook group was created that would inform members of weekly meeting times. In addition, members could also arrange their own meeting times to work simultaneously on transcription. This not only allowed for peers to trouble-shoot common errors together (thereby alleviating some of the work for the project supervisors), it also often created opportunities for transcribers to note common features between manuscripts that may have taken them much longer to discover, or that they may have missed entirely on their own. As such, we find that maintaining face-to-face communication, just as with our own transcribers, makes them more likely to continue transcribing both consistently and efficiently.

§26 We should also be clear that the CTP does not envision the training of its transcribers as ending with this initial training process. The project offers weekly meetings in which transcribers can bring difficult challenges they encounter in their work for a group resolution. These challenges often clarify our own practices to meeting attendees who observe and even participate in the discussion though, just as Polly Duxfield explains of the process on the Estoria de Espanna Project, final decisions on points of contention rest with the project’s leaders (2018, 56–58). Project leaders also sometimes deliver short lectures at these meetings to give the CTP context or better illustrate the principles behind a particularly nuanced transcription practice such as the <app> tag. As discussed above, transcribers’ experiences with the bulletin board constituted a form of participatory learning in a similar way to the discussions in group meetings. Even the collaborative attitude of the project’s members sees our transcribers frequently transcribing in small groups and partnerships, teaching one another and reinforcing what they have already learned (Nelson and Robinson Forthcoming, 14–15). The first steps towards becoming a full transcriber are an initiation into a larger body of team members who are continuously learning from one another through the collaborative transcription process.

Growth of the CTP

§28 The project’s initial growth was measured and relatively small. At first, just a half dozen transcribers were trained by the project leaders themselves and learned about the greater context of the project in weekly meetings while transcribing. From there, we gradually hired more transcribers who were trained by the senior transcribers who would eventually become project supervisors and the authors of this paper. At this stage, we were able to oversee each trainee’s transcription in a timely fashion. This was not only to the benefit of the trainee: every folio of transcription a trainee encoded in the time between their submitting pages and our review of their work would carry early misunderstandings or errors and require time and the resources to go back and correct. This cost is negligible when the number of new employees is small and delays can be kept to a minimum, but can prove an issue when the number of new transcribers greatly outweighs that of transcription supervisors.

§29 At this point in the project, the term limit on the CTP’s grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was approaching at a quicker rate than our transcription cohort was using the allotted funds. The project began hiring more transcribers from a wider pool of students in an effort to achieve as much transcription as possible before the project’s formal end in May 2019.

§30 The CTP tended to hire graduate students as transcribers when available, however, when we could not secure graduate students for transcription work, we turned to senior undergraduate students with some manuscript experience. For instance, the project hired senior students in the University of Saskatchewan’s Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) program. Many of these students had taken some combination of the courses “Exploring Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts”, “Advanced Manuscript Studies”, and English literature courses that focus on Chaucer. In some cases, the work of the manuscript courses directly dealt with materials and content of the CTP (Nelson and Robinson Forthcoming, 8). These courses provided this group of transcribers with valuable experience and understanding of transcription as well as some background in manuscript studies and transcription practices with texts from the Middle Ages in addition to a familiarity with Chaucer’s work. However, our needs for even more transcribers meant we also hired students who had not received this same training around the same time. While it was necessary to cast a wider net to facilitate a larger workforce, this required condensed training that provided context for the project, rudimentary training in manuscript studies, and a passing familiarity with Chaucer and Middle English beyond what one experiences in an introductory literature survey course. All this, of course, was in addition to the transcription training every transcriber received.

§31 This influx of new transcribers was a benefit to the project and resulted in an overall greater rate of transcription but presented some significant challenges for managing the day-to-day operations. Hiring transcribers with little specialized knowledge required more time spent training them and the pages of transcription under review by the supervisors required closer inspection to protect the overall quality of the transcriptions being produced. These supervisory tasks, when coupled with the fact that there were more total transcribers requiring supervision, overloaded our supervising team for a time. This experience is by no means unique: the Transcribe Bentham team describes a similar instance where a New York Times article inspired a surge in new volunteers over the winter holidays when several members of the team were on leave, resulting in a similar problem (Causer et al. 2012, 130). Whereas the consequence for that project was a low retention rate for new volunteers and a backlog that lasted around 10 days, our own was a considerable transcription backlog requiring review and resubmission. The errors made were often fairly insignificant, but the inability to address these immediately meant that they continued to appear in ongoing transcription. This necessitated extra work for the pages’ original transcribers when the supervisors were forced to reassign numerous pages on account of a large number of small but oft-repeated errors. Ultimately, it was still better for the project to take on the new transcribers despite the challenges and stress to the existing team and system. However, as described in more detail below, if we had anticipated this eventuality, we might have put more senior transcribers in place as supervisors before beginning our hiring surge.

§32 This funding issue was further complicated by the ephemeral nature of student employment. Students present a unique challenge when trying to anticipate future progress and regulating the workflow of transcription and revision since their availability can be limited. On its own, this is a relatively minor issue. However, perhaps a more difficult problem altogether is that student schedules fluctuate greatly throughout the term and a student that can contribute only an hour a week in mid-November might work a dozen hours in mid-December. Anticipating the incoming workload for our project leaders and transcription supervisors was frequently a challenge when the project had more transcribers, especially given that supervisor’s schedules could be subject to the same kinds of fluctuations. Unlike a transcriber, who can work as much or as little as their availability allows, supervisors need to respond promptly to submissions.

§33 Student employees also frequently leave. Many members of the cohort of phase two transcribers were senior undergraduates near the end of their programs and master’s students who had a maximum of two years of study and most often one. As a result, some transcribers would have only just begun turning in their best work when they completed their studies or moved on from the CTP to full time jobs elsewhere. Obviously, this is not the students’ fault: the nature of these work patterns is often the result of the precariousness of student positions combined with the demands on students’ time both for their studies and, in some cases, the multiple forms of employment tuition forces them to take. That said, the project did eventually establish a core group of transcribers, several of them PhDs, who participated in the project for well over a year or more, but the circumstances of student employment that affected many members of the team proved to be a consistent issue for the project as a whole.