We are humbled to announce that our TPEN project has been awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities (press release). Work has already begun and you can expect a more active thread of posts about it over the next couple years.

The original t-pen.org platform will persist, but upon launch the thousands of projects currently hosted will be given an upgrade path. The new platform will use the public RERUM service (rerum.io) to store all public transcription data as truly Linked Open Usable Data and provide many more interfaces for coordinating teams, building projects, and annotating pages.

There will be much more information to come. For now, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the TPEN alumni who contributed so much to the code, case testing, and marketing. I reassure the many partners that have integrated TPEN into their own projects and workflows that nothing is breaking and this move forward is designed to lift all ships. I hope to plant an eagerness in the thousands of users who have captured human knowledge and culture on the platform over the last decade as we integrate all their feedback and imaginings. Finally, I acknowledge that this funding award, from the taxpayers of the United States, has accelerated our move to 3.0 significantly. While Saint Louis University would never let such an impactful and beloved platform expire early as so many digital projects tend to do, shifting out of maintenance mode and spying new horizons is exhilarating.