Working with these old memoirs from the Moravian lives projects was very interesting and surprisingly fun. Being able to read something that was written so long ago was something I have never done, and it was really engaging. As I read about John Wiley’s life, I was able to imagine his life and almost grow attached to what I was writing down and feel like what I was doing was really important. Even though reading the piece was engaging and interesting, it presented some challenges. To be able to create a digital text, we had to be able to read what the document said and write down exactly what was written, even if the punctuation or spelling was wrong. The words were faded and the way that people wrote in the past was a lot different from how people write today. From the way they wrote cursive the their word choice, it was hard to be able to read it at times. Letters like F, T and L were sometimes hard to distinguish, as well as two words close together without a space. Also, words were misspelled which presented a whole new challenge. We had to type out the misspelling and then correct it, but at times the misspelling was hard to make out what word they were trying to say. Luckily for the John Wiley memoirs, the archivist that had the documents were able to send our group clearer images of the original copies which was a game changer for being able to transcribe. The help of the professors and also the students that came in to help us was also monumental for being able to transcribe, because their eyes have been trained to read these old documents. We then had to tag different parts of the text and point out a person’s name, dates, places, misspellings, and other things of that nature.
Jacob Hubbard is a sophomore at Bucknell University, and is from San Francisco, CA.
