Around 30 volunteers gathered in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Wednesday afternoon for what one of them dubbed a “nerd party.”
The event, which was officially called “Transcribe-a-thon: Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg,” coincided with the historian’s 150th birthday and aimed to translate some of his letters.
“Every year I mark his birthday,” said Vanessa K. Valdés, who was among the volunteers at the Schomburg Center. “So I’m so incredibly honored to be part of a crowd of people who are celebrating him.”
Arturo Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in 1874 and is considered to be one of the founders of the academic discipline known as Black studies.
“There would be no field of Black studies had it not been for these earlier generations who built the collections, saved the materials, documented what was going on,” said Laura Helton, an assistant English and history professor at the University of Delaware and a co-organizer of the event.
On Wednesday, volunteers were mostly focused on transcribing letters between Schomburg and others, including philosopher Alain Locke, illustrator Albert Smith and French writer René Maran.
Helton said they focused on the years from 1925 to 1931 because they illuminated how Schomburg and others were “invested in the idea that saving, preserving and building the Black history was urgent work.”
The transcribe-a-thon’s ultimate goal was to create a digital compilation of all the Schomburg papers housed at the Center and at Fisk University in Nashville, where Schomburg was a visiting curator in the 1930s. Helton said the scholarly edition will eventually make Schomburg’s collection accessible and available online so people won’t need to travel from library to library to read them.
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