The Tate in London needs an army of volunteers to help transcribe the world’s largest archive of British art, which is now being placed online. The museum is inviting the public to decipher rarely seen documents including Paul Nash’s love letters to his wife Margaret, Barbara Hepworth’s inventory records and Donald Rodney’s sketchbooks. From the comfort of their homes, volunteers across the globe can submit their transcripts to the platform AnnoTate, which launched this month in partnership with Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing research group at the University of Oxford. The digitally searchable files will be published on Tate’s website alongside the original materials after they have been verified by an archivist. During its first nine days, AnnoTate received 10,500 unique visitors, according to a spokeswoman. The 17,000 handwritten Tate documents were digitised with the help of a £2m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
