So, they are looking for free labour from history nerds?
I'd be curious to know more about the ROI here. What they hope to gain. Or even just examples of what decoding this will offer societies understanding of the war that we don't already know.
The American Civil War was a major historical event in a nation's history and the Thomas T. Eckert Papers represent eye witness accounts or at the very least basic data relating to that period of US history.
My own nation's Civil War started in 1642 and although there is a fair amount of documentary evidence available regarding what happened, there certainly wasn't anything like this - raw communications data at the time it happened.
It's priceless and if I was an American I would be signing up right now to assist in the effort.
I'm normally pretty sensitive to stuff like this as well, but I've signed up and transcribed a few pages so far. As a (very amateur) genealogist, I've benefited so, so much from digitized records, most of which I was only able to find because someone else transcribed them and made them searchable. I'd guess, especially given who's organizing this, that the results of this would be made available to the public. Either way, I haven't paid a dime to the transcribers of the countless documents I've accessed, this seems like a way of giving a little in return.
Zooniverse has actually produced some serious results, and never seem to run out of funding. I did a project a while back that classified bat calls separate from regular noise, and they seem to do a good job.
I'd be curious to know more about the ROI here. What they hope to gain. Or even just examples of what decoding this will offer societies understanding of the war that we don't already know.