How to Contribute

As a volunteer project, contributions of time are the most important. Whether you enjoy the detailed work of transcription and proofreading, the critical analysis of revision, or just want to take a minute to report a typo as you're reading, we appreciate you!

Our transcription process is managed through GitHub. Normally used for collaborating on code, GitHub also makes this kind of literary collaboration easy.

Recommended Setup

We recommend Visual Studio Code as an editor. It's extensible and comes with first-class support for the Git workflows we use for transcription and review. When you open the repository, you'll be prompted with a few recommended extensions: vscode-pdf lets you open the source PDFs in an editor window, allowing for side-by-side transcription; Insert Unicode gives some keyboard shortcuts for special characters like ſ that aren't on normal keyboards; and Code Spell Checker helps the revision process by highlighting some words that need to be updated.

After installing Visual Studio Code, you'll create your own fork of the transcription repository (e.g., https://github.com/kingsquill/william-perkins). Follow the GitHub Flow process to create a branch, commit your work, and then submit a pull request for review.

If this seems complex and intimidating, we get it. We're working on a simpler set of instructions, but in the mean time, feel free to drop into our Discord for help getting started!