Transcribing Digitally and by Hand

For the third week’s assignment, we looked at the topic of transcription, or transferring older handwritten works into our own handwritten, and into digital print on the computer. Thankfully I’ve worked on transcribing handwritten texts before, so the confusion and frustration that met my initial attempted to make sense of the script were not novel emotions. However, it was also a good reminder that comprehending texts takes practice, and I was pleased to see that my ‘interpretive muscle’ if that’s a fair description, was growing over the course of the assignment.

I experienced some successes 

Some failures 

And one really hard transcription that I was proud of myself for doing a good job on

Which set me up well for the final part of the assignment: a transcription in my own hand

The pages from the medieval cookbook describing how to “Whiten Cloath” proved more scrutable than the more tightly packed letter forms of the earlier transcriptions, and I was quite pleased with what I was able to produce.

Doing a handwritten transcription was an interesting opportunity to see how easy it is to miscopy a few words if you allow your mind to wander while transcribing. Which resulted in feelings of empathy for the scribes who sometimes bear the brunt of our displeasure over messy or miscopied texts.