The Newberry Library in Chicago is scouting transcribers to demystify its handwritten collection. As Dan Kelly wrote in yesterday’s Chicago, the archive’s hunt for “living Rosetta stones” first kicked off in 2013, when the Newberry launched a campaign to transcribe all its Civil War letters in time for the sesquicentennial. This was such a success that the project has since gained momentum, expanding into all corners of the collection’s vast archive. Volunteer crowdsourcing efforts began in earnest during the pandemic. Because, as Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s curator of modern manuscripts and archives has put it, “people were looking for something...