The understanding of how the transcription of a material document affects the researcher’s connection with that document. In my personal experience, transcribing the Moravian Lives piece in specifics the Samuel Tippet piece it was something that I had never done before. I have never completed a project similar to this one which is why I genuinely enjoyed doing so. It was interesting to me reading the work that the people of the Moravian Church had written. My group’s piece in particular was very religious and I’m assuming that this aspect was similar to a lot of the other groups’ works. I had never learned about these people before and it was intriguing to learn about them by reading their work and transcribing. It affects my understanding because it was almost like I was reading their journal or diary; it was a collection of their thoughts and at times it was super personal. There were also a few times because there were a few discrepancies within the text. Sometimes it was difficult to read and also there were misspellings. Perhaps this is how they spelled it at this certain time period, or just human error.
The process of digital text creation for my group started with dividing up who would transcribe what pages. After, we began to ‘decode’ in my mind. I would read the page and try to understand it best I could and later transcribe it. I would normally bold words I was unsure about or place a ‘?’ if I had no idea and check with my group partners after finishing the full page. I would tag people and places after I finished transcribing the page because I found it easier to do since the page told a little story and I started to pick up on words that were used often such as brother. I learned that this word needed to be tagged and was being used in a religious manner. After finishing all of my assigned pages, my group members double checked to make sure that all of our pages were both correctly transcribed and tagged. I felt that I had a connection to the documents because of how personal they were. For example, in some of the pages I transcribed the author spoke about their heart breaking and several emotions such as sadness and despair. I felt like I knew the character because of how deeply they were speaking and because I was rewriting their own words which no one had done before. The links to the original piece as well as my group’s transcribe piece are below.
Original: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/
Transcribed Works Main Link: http://moravian.bucknell.edu/memoirs/Samuel-Tippet/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13MJaRyAwmMfOANP_Th0uo7URnXYOoho1psEbMa9MMOc/edit
My Work: (Pgs. 7,8,10,15): http://moravian.bucknell.edu/scripto/?scripto_action=transcribe&scripto_doc_id=300045&scripto_doc_page_id=4000757
Morgan Graning is a junior at Bucknell University. She is a political science major and sociology minor. Morgan is from Long Island, New York.