The five pages that I transcribed looked at the end of Samuel Tippet’s religious evolution. Tippet is from England and, as he told it, growing up he was a trouble maker and clearly believes that he has engaged in some actions that are potentially unforgiveable. Tippet’s remorse of his actions as a child and a young adult are clear in my team members transcriptions and his new-found relationship with his lord and savior, Jesus is what he focuses on most in my five pages.
The process of digital text creation is tedious work but if done correctly can be incredibly helpful. For me the process of transcribing begins with reading the entire page, or at least what I could comprehend with ease. I do this to gain a sense of the message that was trying to be articulated by Tippet because, more often than not, the reader will come across a word, or many, while transcribing that is illegible, spelled incorrectly, or totally foreign. Having a general sense of what Tippet was trying to say can help decipher the seemingly nonsensical words for you. After gaining this overview, you begin to transcribe letter by letter. The difficulties that came along with transcribing my works were the different ways in which people in the 18thcentury wrote some words and letters. For example, the 18thcentury English way of writing a word with a double s is different than we write it today. There were many times that I confused the first s, which is much taller than the lowercase s we think of today, with the letter f. It took time to pick up on these different techniques used back then but the more I transcribed the easier it was for me notice the 18thcentury letters and what they translated to in our culture.
The process of transcribing is slow and tedious but it is super helpful after the fact. While transcribing Tippet’s work I remember not understanding the gist of what he was trying to say because I was constantly having to stop reading to decipher a word and this makes it hard to actually follow along with the story. After I completed the transcriptions I was able to go back to my work and read what I had transcribed with ease. It was gratifying knowing that someone who reads my transcriptions will be able to read page to page with ease and really learn about Samuel Tippet’s life.
Below are the links to my transcriptions along with their page numbers.
18)
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16)
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13
Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit
Clayton Wright is an economics major at Bucknell University. He transferred to Bucknell from Bowdoin College in 2017. Before college, he grew up in Summit NJ and attended The Pingry School.
