http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Esther-Latrobe/
Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JskmdGh4grdhqHksXQmYSCRA0D3VlchO1ceAMjTDobo/edit
My group’s assignment was to review a 40-page digital archive of text written by Esther Latrobe and then decipher the text back into modern day English. This literature was handwritten in script using an old English dialect from the 1800’s. Personally, I found transcribing this document challenging because script is not a common form of writing that I am used to reading. Ironically, the elementary school teachers who insisted that the real world used script were mistaken. After a couple weeks of writing in script, I reverted back to writing standardly and rarely saw the use of script ever again. The first curveball thrown at our group while transcribing these documents was when we encountered double letters. In script, a double letter results in one large letter next to a smaller version of that letter. This concept was difficult to pick up on first but once you recognize what these double letters looked like the words became rather simple to read, which seemed to be the general theme of this process. We started to recognize the style of the handwriting, making the deciphering process even easier. However, a major dilemma was the quality of the pictures that were provided. Since we had a larger document compared to other groups, a significant portion of our archive provided blurry pictures. However, after contacting a London archivist, we were quicked given a pdf of a clear version.
I found it interesting to learn about the differences in the linguistic style of Latrobe and colloquial English. For example, since Latrobe was quite religious the text had a lot of content about the “Saviour” instead of using the word “Savior”. Another recurring word was “thou” and “thy”. When our group finished transcribing the document, we had to reach a consensus on how we wanted to tag the transcribed words. We were slightly unclear on whether we wanted to tag all prepositions such as “she” or “her” as people or all any type of word that suggested people such as “daughter” or “family” in the people category. However, in the end, we decided on just tagging all proper nouns in the people category.
