Audra HilseIn the Ayn Rand Archives, there are thousands of pages of Rand’s handwriting in her collected papers. The only effective way to get accurate transcripts of handwritten material is for people to create them manually. But it would take many years for our archivists to transcribe all the handwritten material from the Ayn Rand Papers.
So to make material from our collections more accessible at a quicker pace, we launched a volunteer project in November 2024.
Much of this handwritten material was written by Rand herself, and it ranges from some of her earliest notes on fiction and philosophy as a new immigrant to the United States to articles and talks written late in her career as a well-known author and public intellectual.
One of the biggest sections of handwritten material is Rand’s notes, outlines, and discarded draft pages from her work on her final novel, Atlas Shrugged. Volunteers started with all that material available, totaling 2,260 pages. Our staff have subsequently added other handwritten material (such as notes and outlines from Rand’s first novel, We the Living), and will continue to add more.
Although the Archives previously digitized all this material by scanning images of each page, cursive handwriting can be difficult for people to read, let alone for computers. So given the current state of technology, the material needs to be typed as text that accurately captures the original handwritten words and their formatting. Our solution was to invite interested individuals to work on this task through crowdsourcing, a common practice among archives and libraries.
To coordinate the work of many volunteers, we used the transcription platform FromThePage, which is designed for exactly this kind of project. FromThePage allows Archives staff to upload images of scanned handwritten documents from our collections in a convenient layout. The original page is displayed right next to a typing box in which a volunteer can type the handwritten text as they read it. It also affords capturing text formatting (underlines, strikethroughs, insertions) to reflect what Ayn Rand wrote on the original page as accurately as possible.
Even with a platform designed for the purpose, transcription is a challenging task. Every individual’s handwriting is unique. Some pages Rand wrote with more care, so if you are able to read cursive English, they are not difficult to read:
Other pages, however, are much more complicated:
Rand wrote all this material for herself as she worked on developing and drafting her novels; she was not considering whether her handwriting was legible to anyone else.
We strive to make sure that this project is a trade, mutually beneficial for everyone involved. The Archives clearly benefits from receiving thousands of transcribed pages ready for use in a variety of future projects from books to exhibits, at a speed that we could not otherwise achieve. But volunteers benefit as well: in addition to early access to this fascinating evidence of Rand’s writing process and philosophical thought, many are finding the transcription process itself to be an enjoyable challenge.
“The transcription is challenging, fascinating and somewhat addictive,” noted one volunteer. “I am constantly awed by the research/background material that AR prepared before she even started writing her novels. Also, it’s illuminating to read her early drafts and character development notes. Keep those pages coming!”
And:
“It is [an] honor to have access to Ayn Rand’s notes knowing that those were the very pages she once worked on,” another volunteer said. “Having the chance to observe the development of the plots step by step feels like being next to her while she was writing. The most inspiring part is to see the attention Rand [paid] on every single word. She was totally dedicated to making each sentence perfect and every manuscript is a testament to the effort she put into creating the world of Atlas Shrugged and We the Living.”
This enjoyment is evidenced by the amazing progress achieved by the volunteers. As of publication time, out of a total of 2,839 pages, 71 percent are transcribed, and many of those have undergone peer review and editing. Archives staff do a final review before approving a transcript page, and that process is 6 percent complete at this time.
We want to offer a deeply grateful thank-you to all the volunteers who have contributed so far to this fantastic progress.
With the rapid advances in AI, we’re eager to augment our current volunteer-powered transcription workflow with automation. Once AI can generate usable transcriptions for our volunteers to verify, we expect to accelerate the pace even more. This in turn will help make Rand’s handwritten words more easily accessible via future Archives exhibits and publications.
If you are interested in joining this volunteer project, please contact Audra Hilse (ahilse@aynrand.org).
Ibis Slade
Brandon Lisi
