By Nanea Kalani

Ike Kuokoa

When I heard the call for volunteers on the radio, I knew I wanted to be a part of the Ike Kuokoa initiative.

I signed up that very morning to help with the effort to transcribe tens of thousands of Hawaiian-language newspaper pages dating back to the mid-19th century. The project doesn't involve translation, but it's proving to be much more challenging — and rewarding — than I had expected.

Ike Kuokoa means "liberating knowledge" in Hawaiian. The project launched Nov. 28 with the goal of transcribing 60,000 digital scans of Hawaiian-language newspaper pages into searchable typescript by this summer.

Hawaiian language scholar Puakea Nogelmeier — he's also an award-winning songwriter, kumu hula and University of Hawaii associate professor of Hawaiian language — serves as director for the project. His call for volunteers on Hawaii Public Radio got me to join.

According to the project's website:

"More than 125,000 pages of Hawaiian-language newspapers were printed in more than 100 newspapers between 1834 and 1948. They equal 1 million or more typescript pages of text — apparently the largest native-language cache in the western world."

"The newspapers became an intentional repository of knowledge, opinion and historical progress as Hawaii moved through kingdom, constitutional monarchy, republic and territory, yet only 2 percent of that repository has been integrated into our English-speaking world today. ...

"Our goal is to make the whole available collection word-searchable, and to do it by July 31, 2012. It will open up hundreds of thousands of pages worth of data on history, culture, politics, sciences, world view, and more."

As a journalist and as a Hawaiian, I not only thought it was a really cool project, but I felt an obligation to pitch in. So did more than 2,000 others.

Here's how it works. Once you've registered as a volunteer on the project website, you can "reserve" one newspaper page at a time through your customized homepage.

An image file of a randomly selected newspaper page is downloaded along with a standard text file for the transcribing. The basic rule is: Type what you see. You have seven days to complete the page. You're allowed one seven-day extension before the page is released back into the pool.

As of early this week, 1,280 of the 60,000 pages have been completed. An additional 1,050 pages are in reserved status.

Over a recent weekend, I finally completed my first page. It took me about six hours — much longer than I anticipated.

For one, there was a ton of text on the page. It was six columns wide, and there was an average eight to 10 words per line in each of those columns. The page was predominantly text instead of a mix of headlines and text and images like today's papers. There was no art except for a few tiny sketches of things like a horse and steamship.

For two, the quality of the print made it extremely difficult to decipher words and letters in many places.

Case in point:

Luckily, being familiar with Hawaiian words and sentence patterns, I could figure out some of the fragmented text. But some spots required me to insert an "@" as the guidelines allow for defects and problem areas.

For three, I was curious to know what I was transcribing, and would often look up unfamiliar words to figure out what was being said. That turned out to be distracting for efficiency purposes, but really fascinating.

The page I got was from January 1877 — before the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. There were a lot of ads for lawyers, doctors and stores. There were court hearing notices signed by judges. There were schedules for steamship routes between the islands. There was an ad offering a $5 reward for a lost brooch.

Unfortunately, most of the text under the heading "Na Hunahuna Mea Hou" — or "bits of news" — was too hard to make out. There was a short brief about an auction and something about train speeds from places abroad like Belgium, Holland and Germany.

There was also a lengthy piece under the heading Na Mea Hou o Hana nei, or News from Hana — the town I grew up in on Maui. It was written by someone named L.K.N. Paahao of Hana, Maui, and dated Jan. 23, 1877.

I'll be reserving my next page this week, and hope to kokua as much as possible toward this effort. There were 2,359 registered users as of this writing.

To be a success, the Ike Kuokoa website says it needs "at least 3,000 active volunteers to meet the goals of the project, while twice or three times that number will assure success. Consider being a part of this historical effort, and please help by telling others about it."

You can also watch a short video about Ike Kuokoa below. "We are liberating knowledge from the dust, and we believe the knowledge will liberate us," Nogelmeier says in the video.