BYU students use technology to transcribe Wilford Woodruff documents

A team of four Brigham Young University college students is working on a unique undertaking for the Wilford Woodruff Papers Basis.

“We’re performing on some thing that, to my know-how, hasn’t been finished in advance of,” explained Bryce Lunceford, a single of the pupils.

The crew — Lunceford, Amber Oldroyd, Paul Smith and Nathan Christiansen, all element of BYU’s utilized and computational math application — are working with personal computers to aid assist all those transcribing the writings of early Latter-working day Saint leader Wilford Woodruff.

What is the Wilford Woodruff Papers challenge?

Wilford Woodruff was one of the earliest and most prosperous missionaries of the restored Latter-day Saint religion. He served seven missions that spanned more than 10 several years before turning into the fourth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-working day Saints.

Starting up in 1828, Woodruff’s meticulous documents document his substantial ministry and missionary company, the teachings of Joseph Smith and other leaders, every day happenings, his witness of the church’s Restoration and other important occasions right up until his death in 1898.

The Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation is doing work in cooperation with the Wilford Woodruff Family Association and with the Church Record Department to track down and digitize all of the early church leader’s surviving documents. 

The foundation has found, digitized and organized more than 114,000 pages of President Woodruff’s writings since the project was launched on March 1, 2020, with 1000’s of paperwork however to go.

How pcs are transcribing Woodruff documents

To correctly transcribe and verify Woodruff’s tens of hundreds of files would get hundreds of hrs and need tens of millions of bucks. The students hope to assistance use personal computers to total the process inside 10 many years, in accordance to a Wilford Woodruff Papers Basis news launch.

“Wilford Woodruff recorded his eyewitness account of the Restoration of the gospel in his journal and other paperwork using not only English penned in longhand, but also two versions of shorthand, the Deseret Alphabet, sporadic Latin and Greek and additional than 3,000 one of a kind symbols,” the information release mentioned. “The capabilities essential to ascertain no matter if a curve and dot on a page is a cursive letter, a shorthand mark or a image is intellect-boggling.”

The existing transcription approach involves one man or woman to manually style every phrase as browse in the handwritten version, then two folks evaluate it.

The staff of four BYU students is doing the job to produce an algorithm for the personal computer to differentiate and study the marks in Woodruff’s files. The group is also utilizing optical character recognition, a frequently utilized method of converting typed or handwritten paperwork into text.

As soon as transcribed, the group evaluations the computer’s performance and makes changes to increase performance.

“We watch the community as it is schooling and a little something termed the shed operate basically tells us how very good the computer is at what we explained to it to do,” Lunceford mentioned. “As we see the loss go down, that indicates the laptop or computer is having far better.”

Transcribing technological innovation in the long term

It is an arduous procedure with some demo and error, but the team is optimistic that it will help save time and resources in the long run. The technologies could also be utilized to other historical papers projects.

“It can take a ton of time to educate volunteers the expertise that are needed to transcribe and if the laptop or computer can do the matters that are at this time becoming finished by volunteers, then the transcription can be completed a great deal quicker,” Christiansen claimed.

The undertaking has not only added to the students’ expert expertise but it has strengthened their religion.

Oldroyd has been motivated by Woodruff’s journals and is maintaining just one for her future posterity.

Study extra about the Wilford Woodruff Papers job by visiting wilfordwoodruffpapers.org.