We’ve been in touch with Professor Melissa Terras, Director of the University College London Centre for Digital Humanities, who is involved in ‘crowd sourced’ projects creating digital archives from original material. Despite being on a much smaller scale, using simple technology and only starting last autumn, our own ‘Reading the Past’ project has now racked up more than 700,000 words, mostly letters from the agents managing the 18th century lead business. Melissa says “I’m involved mostly with transcribe bentham – which is now nearly hitting 4million words, and I know that Old Weather, likewise, has hit the millions, but in my opinion, you’ve done a huge amount of work and this is a fairly large corpus of transcribed material. Fabulous, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Please do let me know when the work goes online, I would be happy to circulate it to my colleagues working in crowdsourcing, etc.” Encouraging feedback! The fruits of our labour will hopefully go online early next year.
The Dukesfield Smelters and Carriers Project aimed to celebrate and discover the heritage of the Dukesfield Arches & lead carriers' routes between Blaydon and the lead mines of Allendale and Weardale. A two year community project, it was led by the Friends of the North Pennines in partnership with Hexhamshire and Slaley Parish Councils and the active support of Allendale Estates. It was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the generous support of other sponsors.
Friends of the North Pennines: Charity No:1137467
