My group is transcribing writing from 18th century Moravian culture. If you were to look at my digital transcription and the original hand written document they would look incredibly different. Tanselle explains, “Obviously a transcription cannot exactly reproduce the relative precision of carelessness with which handwritten letters are formed or their relative sizes, or the amount of space between words and lines” (465). This point that no transcription will ever look exactly like the original document is important to keep in mind when observing my group’s specific transcription. My group of four people divided up the pages of Samuel Tippett’s memoir and each transcribed four or five pages. The fact that transcriptions cannot perfectly represent the original document implies that there is a lot of room for discrepancies when transcribing the same text. This means that even though my group is transcribing the same story, the way in which I approached and understood my pages is most likely very different from the way the approached and understood theirs. Pierazzo further supports this point by explaining, “The process of selection is inevitably an interpretive act: what we choose to represent and what we do not depends either on the particular vision that we have of a particular manuscript or on practical constraints” (465). When we went back to our transcription and began the process of mark ups, it provided us with a way of linking our texts together both logically and stylistically.
When deciding how we wanted to mark up our transcription the hardest element was keeping everything consistent. Michael Hunter explains, “An electronic edition is like an iceberg, with far more data potentially available than is actually visible on the screen, and this is at the same time a great opportunity and a temptation to overdo things” (467). Having the meeting to go over our guildlines was important to make sure our pages matched. The two hardest elements to keep consistent were deciding how we would mark dates and emotions. Dates were presented to us in a few different ways. Sometimes we would be given a date saying “In the year 1754”. Other times, it was presented without the word year in front of the date, and the final way included the day and month. Eventually, we decided that in our mark ups of dates we would include months, days, and years (like 1754) and we would leave out the word year or years in the mark up. That was a simple decision, but the decision on how we would mark up emotions was much more complicated. Constantly throughout our memoir, Samuel Tippett used words and phrases like, “love”, “heart have felt”, “something in my heart”. All of these phrases seem as if they are portraying emotion, but we did not decide to tag all of them. We decided that we would only tag words, classified as emotions, which are directly related to Tippet himself. This allowed us to not go crazy in our task to tag emotions.
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.