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The article discusses the crowdsourcing of historical document archival tasks, such as transcribing digital images of documents, and describes the debate over citizen participation in academic tasks. The War Office archive at the digital-humanities laboratory the Center for History and New Media is described, which hosts copies of digitized papers that were lost in November 1800 to a fire in the U.S. federal War Office. The Bentham Project, which crowdsourced the transcription of papers by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is also mentioned. Citizen participation in science and humanities is also discussed.

The author reflects on the impact of the online tool Google Books and its digital archives of 19th-century literature on historians' research of the 19th-century. Topics include the impact of digitization on scholarship of the Victorian era, the author's exploration of the fictional provincial scholar Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's novel "Middlemarch," and Google Book's access to out-of-print and non-canonized literature.