How do you know how much to transcribe?

So transcribing can be a valuable tool in your arsenal as a scholar, but how often should you do it? Should you transcribe every document you come across?

The answer to this question depends on a lot of different factors including your typing speed, the quality of the file, the project you are working on, and whether you think you will want to consult the file in the future.

If the files can be OCRed easily, it is almost always worth the time. Digitizing a document makes it keyword searchable helping you find information quickly.

If the documents are handwritten, damaged, or otherwise hard or impossible to OCR that question is going to depend on the needs of your team.

My Approach

Personally, I transcribe every single archival file that I think is relevant to my research. This is time consuming decision. Each archival trip I’ve taken has gathered 4,000 – 6,000 photographs, maybe a third of which turn out to be worth transcribing. Transcribing even a few thousand photographs worth of material, however, takes months of full-time work. Ouch.

The process is slow, but it gives me time to carefully look through what I’ve found. Moreover, I’m a fast typer and a slow reader of handwriting. So it doesn’t take me much longer to transcribe a document than it does for me to read an old and damaged handwritten document in the first place.

Over the 15 years or so that I’ve been doing historical work (and with help of students later on in my career) I gathered thousands of pages of transcribed material that are now available at my fingertips any time I’m interested in writing a book, presenting a conference paper, or teaching a class. So the approach has a high up front cost, but it has paid off throughout my career in many different ways.

Other Approaches

Other scholars take a very different approach, transcribing almost nothing they gather from the archive. They write their articles as they are doing their research and frequently go back to their original material throughout the research process. This approach emphasizes iterations rather than writing in a continuous block of time. With each new document or oral history the scholar encounters, they modify their written work to accommodate it.

This approach lets them get started faster, but adds time later on should they ever have to go back and reread difficult to decipher handwriting.

Your Approach

If you are working as part of a team, it is worth sitting down with the lead researcher to figure out how much they want you to transcribe. If you are doing research on your own, it is worth experimenting with what works for you.

There are thousands of different ways to do research, each of which come with their own unique advantages and shortcomings. It is up to you to figure out what approach you feel the most comfortable with.