Over the past four years, the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at the American Philosophical Society (APS) has developed The Revolutionary City (Rev City) digital portal, digitizing material from three original partners—APS, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. At its core, Rev City is a collaborative, multi-institution digitization project with the ambitious goal of creating the largest known digital archive of documents related to the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Featuring over 6,000 unique objects, 46,000 pages, and 95 collections from just three institutions, Rev City is well on its way to meeting this goal by 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Though still in an active beta phase and not yet officially launched, the portal’s usage has surged by nearly 300% in recent months. Since its inception in 2020, the project has grown well beyond its pilot phase. Continuous development has allowed us to refine the portal based on user feedback, emerging technologies, and additional resources. In 2023, the project team focused on migrating the portal to the latest version of Islandora, an open-source platform, revamping the portal’s frontend design, and developing backend workflows that will streamline the project’s expansion.
During this time, The Revolutionary City Collaborative was formed. With generous support from the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, this partnership of five Philadelphia-based historical institutions—APS, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections and McNeil Center for Early American Studies—has been planning exhibitions, programs, and other initiatives to help the public engage with the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This funding has also enabled the Rev City team to enhance the Portal by developing discovery tools, teacher resources, and public programs focused on engaging diverse audiences in a conversation about Philadelphia’s pivotal role in the American Revolution.
To assist with activating the Portal, we brought on Isabella ‘Bella’ Kolic as the Rev City Education and Engagement Coordinator for a one-year term. In collaboration with the APS Education Programs team, Bella has developed a suite of educator resources designed to put primary source learning about Revolutionary Philadelphia in the classroom. These include story maps, family trees, document spotlights, and classroom activities. Click here to explore these materials and learn more about Quaker women in Philadelphia during the Revolution.
In 2024, the CDS used innovative digital transcription tools—Kraken and eScriptorium—to train models for machine-generated transcriptions. For more details, see a post by David R. Nelson about how the CDS is using these tools to automate transcriptions for Rev City documents. The introduction of the transcription platform has become a tool for community outreach and engagement through workshops and educational programs. During Archives Month Philly, APS hosted Rev City’s first Transcribathon, transcribing documents from the Portal that highlight diverse perspectives from inhabitants of 18th-century Philadelphia. With over 50 participants throughout the day and roughly 200 pages transcribed, attendees became active participants in uncovering the voices of those that have been traditionally marginalized to the sidelines of history. The materials generated in these free public programs will enhance the Portal’s accessibility and the diversity of its content. For more information visit our events page for upcoming transcription events and other workshops.
October 2024 marked a significant milestone in our engagement efforts, with APS hosting a workshop for teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. The goal was to support educators in incorporating primary source documents into their classrooms. As we look to 2025, we are committed to involving educators in shaping resources that are useful, adaptable, and meaningful for classroom settings.
To stay up to date on project developments and hear directly from our team, visit our blog, Dispatches from the Revolutionary City.