Handwriting Transcription

For the transcription, I did the first draft of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I was able to transcribe this rather efficiently, but I did oftentimes stumble on the p’s and f’s which were not very distinct in my eyes. Before choosing to transcribe this one, I looked at several of the other examples and while this one had some corrections and scribbles, many of the other examples, especially the poems by members of Henry VIII’s court, were covered in corrections. Connecting back to our discussion on Friday, I think it’s really interesting to analyze these corrections and see how the meaning of the writing has changed. I chose not to include scribbled words in my transcription which could then lead to a loss of history and meaning. I certainly think that the job of scribal copying is very challenging and must therefore yield a decent amount of loss of information. Even the loss of the original script style can influence the meaning of the texts.