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The British Museum’s collection of postcards from the Middle East spans from c.1890 to the present day, across landscapes and borders that have changed significantly in that time. Our collection aims to archive a dying form of communication. In order to understand more about the way people wrote to one another on postcards, we have been transcribing the messages written on them.
Several of our cards have messages which are not written in English, and so we are inviting others to help us transcribe and translate these messages, and help us establish the networks of communication used in a largely pre-social-media environment.
This project is therefore a test, to determine whether there is an appetite for people to help us with this task.