EarlyPrint Curation

EarlyPrint is a digital collaborative effort that relies on editors to suggest corrections to transcriptions of early English texts. The goal is to create a linguistically annotated and searchable archive of the early English print record. My assigned text for this week was Holinshed’s Chronicles of Irish, Scottish, and English history from the sixteenth century. 

The main difficulty in transcribing the text was the poor quality of the scan which rendered the text almost illegible. We were able to find an alternative copy that was much clearer. Using a different copy raises a few concerns about how true we are staying to the version of the text we are transcribing. However, it’s better to sacrifice accuracy to comprehend the text’s contents.

I had a very difficult time with the spelling of some words. For instance, one of the words I had to transcribe was “bnfeynedly”. I couldn’t identify what word this would have been in modern English.  One solution I found was having autocorrect change it to determine the regularized spelling.

Transcribing the printed text was easier than transcribing the manuscripts from the Transcription Exercise. This illustrates how books have transformed from works of art, where the text is almost secondary, to mass produced products that are less beautiful but more accessible. The standardized printed font is much clearer to read than the ornate font of manuscripts and I didn’t stumble upon any unfamiliar abbreviations, unlike with manuscripts.