The Deseret alphabet was created in the 1850s by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a phonetic writing system designed to make English spelling more logical and easier to learn. Its purpose was to promote literacy among church members of various nationalities and help standardize written communication, though it ultimately fell out of use as the standard English alphabet remained the dominant writing system.

Despite the alphabet's lack of use it is still [of interest to researchers](http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/rshosted/deseret.html) to understand the linguistic history of the American frontier as accents are fundamentally encoded into the phonetic characters. 

Currently there are a large number of untranscribed documents written in Deseret. This hackathon aims to develop models that will automate this process to ultimately accelerate Deseret's research.