memoir – Page 3 – Humanities Now!

Assignment #1

The hardest aspect of the transcription process was learning to read 19th century British handwriting because everything I read now, whether it be textbooks or online articles, is in print. Although I learned how to read and write in cursive in grade school, it was hard reading a person’s handwriting because the letters were not always clearly written out. However, I do understand it is very difficult to write consistently, especially when writing memoirs that are 40 pages long. Another problem I faced was more technical because the pictures of the pages were blurry so it was hard to read the sentences at all. Also, I could not distinguish the different punctuation marks on some pages because they either looked like streaks of ink or other punctuation marks. Thankfully, Professor Faull had requested her colleagues to send clearer pictures so I was able to transcribe all of the pages. I realized it is crucial to have clear digital copies in order to transcribe and analyze any historic documents. Without clear documents, it is impossible to create accurate digital texts which is crucial for allowing anyone on the Internet to have access to information only scholars would have had without the digitization of historical documents. It was interesting to be able to read these documents because I think as a management student at Bucknell, I would have not had the opportunity to learn about the Moravian documents. It was interesting to read Esther Latrobe’s memoir because I would not have had the opportunity to learn about a Christian woman who lived in 19th century England otherwise. I was surprised to read the same phrases that Christians still use till this day like “The Lord Our Shepard”, “everlasting kingdom” and “he speaks, the universe obeys”. As a person who grew up in the Church, I never thought about whether or not Christians in the past centuries used the same jargon as modern day Christians even though the culture changed in reaction to society changing.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JskmdGh4grdhqHksXQmYSCRA0D3VlchO1ceAMjTDobo/edit

Julianna Kim

Ester Latrobe Transcription

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.

Quinta Cinna