[Amanda L. French]

Victory in Europe Day Transcribathon
May 8, 2018

Join us in celebrating VE Day with a Transcribathon for The American Soldier Project
10am – 5pm (EDT)
Athenaeum Classroom, Newman Library

https://lib.vt.edu/tas.html

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More about The American Soldier Project

The American Soldier Collaborative Digital Archive [Zooniverse Project Link] is a project to make broadly available a remarkable collection of written reflections on war and the armed forces by American soldiers who fought in the Second World War. Early on in the conflict, the War Department created an in-house social and behavioral sciences research unit, the Army Research Branch (ARB). The Branch anonymously surveyed and interviewed approximately half a million personnel over the course of the war. Free from the threat of censorship or retaliation, soldiers not only filled out ARB surveys, but tens of thousands provided additional handwritten commentary about military service. The results of these surveys was analyzed and reported by the ARB to the Army in real-time. The same data was re-analyzed and published after the war in an authoritative four-volume series, The American Soldier (1949-50). The soldiers\’ handwritten commentaries were separated and scanned to microfilmed rolls as orphaned records. The very personal words of tens of thousands of soldiers have long remained available only to those who could to travel to Washington, DC to read the text on a single set of 44 microfilm rolls.

The Zooniverse transcription site for The American Soldier is your opportunity to contribute to this important historical endeavor!

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