EarlyPrint Curation

During this assignment, I worked with a digitized version of the 1567 book “Certaine tragicall discourses written out of Frenche and Latin” (the full title is much longer) by Geffraie Fenton. I worked with this book through EarlyPrint, a website that hopes to create searchable and accurate digitized versions of English texts from 1473 to the 1700s. Because the digitizations of these texts were created from microfilms of the original books, which are themselves often difficult to read, the EarlyPrint texts have many places where there are missing words, letters, or even whole pages. By comparing this version of the Fenton book to scans of the original copy on ProQuest, I attempted to help fill some of these gaps.

Comparing this book to the medieval texts I read for the ‘Handwriting Transcription’ assignment, I was surprised by how many of the same difficulties I encountered. In both assignments the lack of standardized spelling made it difficult to fill in blanks. Similarly, unusual formatting in both was confusing. The roman numerals in the scribal texts and the italicized words in the Fenton book were more challenging to read than the ‘normal’ writing. However, there were some errors that were unique to the printed format. Many of the missing letters were due to ink splotches or places where it looked like an error with the printing apparatus had occurred. There were also some letters that I could not distinguish because they looked like combinations of other letters or matched no other symbol that I saw on the page.

Sources:
EarlyPrint