Douglass Day event puts Wilkes U. students in touch with history

WILKES-BARRE — Zack Paraway conceded with a chuckle behind the face mask that he’d like to be getting course credit for transcribing old, scanned images on the computer screen to searchable text, meticulously figuring out how to read the antiquated fonts.

But there were bigger reasons to dive into the records of the Colored Conventions from the 1800s.

“I want to be informed, to know the background of what happened and how we got where we are,” the Wilkes University freshman communications major said, taking a brief break from participating in the annual Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon Tuesday morning.

This is Wilkes’ third year participating in the event, which involves numerous schools and organizations working through cloud-based internet technology to make old documents related to history of Blacks in America more accessible. Done in honor of African American reformer, activist, abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass, the event gets volunteers to access scanned historical documents via Zooniverse, transcribing them online into searchable text documents.

It is held this time each year partly on a whim of Douglass himself, who escaped from slavery to become one of the nation’s most distinguished reformers. Wilkes Assistant History Professor Amy Sopak-Joseph explained that Douglass didn’t know his birth date, so he arbitrarily picked Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day. The transcribe-a-thon is held on or near that date both to honor Douglass and as part of Black History Month.

This year participants focused on wide range of records from the Colored Conventions, which Sopak-Joseph noted was the 19th century’s longest campaign for Black civil rights. Douglass was heavily involved. Groups of Black activists at the local, state and national levels began gathering in 1830 to “discuss and debate work to expand Black rights,” she said. Initially the conventions were mostly about abolition of slavery, but they continued well beyond the American Civil War and the freeing of slaves.

Because the documents are from conventions, and not an individual person, Sopak-Joseph said, there’s an added component to the project this year: Try to learn more about the many people who wrote the documents being scanned, which included minutes from convention meetings, correspondences between those involved, and newspaper accounts of the proceedings, among other documents.

Sophomore Criminology major Juan Ortiz was transcribing the start of minutes of one of the conventions, and conceded it wasn’t particularly compelling reading. But he still found the work interesting. “It’s a little difficult figuring out the fonts,” he said. “And they used words and language differently.”