Category: Transcription

For me, this assignment was really hard. A lot of the words were either hard to read or out of date for me to be able to decipher. Some of the words, for example haversacks, were not a word that comes up very often in my vocabulary, which makes it difficult for me to think about it when I am trying to decipher a word. Sections of his writings were way easier to interpret then others. For example, as we reached the bottom, missing words turned into full missing blocks of sentences.

The areas towards the bottom were more scrunched together, probably because James was trying to fit more in less space. I don’t know why I thought it was so hard, maybe it was because I lack a lot of experience in interpreting letters from the eighteen hundreds. Other parts of it were just really over written, as I show below.

A lot of words came up in my entry like this, where he had written what looked like over itself a few times. These were harder to interpret. I had a lot of words that I was not exactly sure what they were, but I could make out an enough letters so that I could make a solid guess with the help of its context. In conclusion, I found this assignment to be very difficult but rewarding once I finished it.

Transcribing my page from Linn’s diary was a new kind of challenge that I had never come across before, and I think I learned quite a bit from the experience.  Overall, the process went a bit smoother than the daunting task I imagined in the beginning, but I still came across my fair share of issues along the way.  For example, the variations in Linn’s

writing style tended to throw me off, particularly when his handwriting became small and rushed.  Individual letters seemed to clump into bigger ones, or big ones break down into smaller.  I experienced the most trouble of this sort in the final lines of the page, where Linn began to write smaller to fit all his ideas on a single sheet.

I thought that this project was a great introduction to the wide field of Digital Humanities; a hands-on activity dealing with one of the fields basic forms.  I learned a few small, semantic facts from this project (that &c is an abbreviation for et cetera, for example), but I also took away some bigger ideas.  This project gave me a better understanding of the interpretive skills that are necessary when dealing with the humanities.  I also developed a strange appreciation for the work I was doing, an understanding that these words may not have been read for over a hundred years, and we’re trying to make them available to everyone.

In this post I will describe the experiences I had while transcribing one of James Merrill Linn’s diary entries. The diary entry I transcribed was written in February of 1862. I started by opening a text edit page and the diary entry side by side. I made sure to space out each line on my text edit document in accordance to the letter, that way it was easy to find my spot when I went back to words I could not figure out upon the first read.

Overall the process was fun, but was very difficult and frustrating at times. When I first started the transcription I struggled the most. However, the further along I got, the easier transcribing became because I began to get used to his handwriting. I also figured out that I worked best when I worked on the entry for short periods of time.

Although I was able to transcribe most of the words, there were some instances in which the word was illegible or smudged. There was one particular word that bugged me and I was never able to figure out. There were also parts of the letter in which Linn’s handwriting got very sloppy, possibly because he was in a rush. These sections definitely took much more time to figure out.

One huge advantage during this process was having a partner to work with. There were many instances in which my partner was able to recognize a letter that I could not and based off that single letter, I was able to make up the word. Another aspect that made this easier was taking advantage of the context. Based on the rest of the sentence, it wasn’t too difficult to make out an individual word. For example the word “hint” alone I was not able to figure out. However the rest of the sentence was “…found a can of lard and by a ___ of greasing…”. The ending of the missing word looked like “int” and based on the context I was able to guess that the first letter was an h. Throughout the transcription process I was able to use the context several times to help me.

In this post, I will discuss my experience in transcribing James Merrill Linn’s letter. My specific letter was Diary 60, which covered April 17th and the beginning of April 18th. I used the Preview and TextEdit apps side by side to transcribe. I would transcribe one line at a time and add a (\) whenever Linn finished a line, in which I would also start a new one to make sure I would not get lost.

One difficulty that I had in this assignment was obviously Linn’s handwriting. While I am not calling him a sloppy writer, handwritten work has surely changed since the 1860s. One specific instance where I was really challenged was in this screen shot. That word looks illegible to me, so I guessed the word “military.”

A specific word that was always giving me trouble was the word “New Bern.” This was the name

 of a place Linn had been. I had no idea if this was a person, place, or thing until I searched it on the internet and found where Linn was talking about. Originally, I thought it had been “New Beme.”

After discussing with my classmates and trying to find out the context of Linn’s situations, I found the transcribing process to be much easier. Discovering certain quirks in Linn’s handwriting also made the process much simpler.

For this transcription assignment, I will be discussing the challenges and the overall process of transcribing Diary entry 34. This diary entry is a personal account of James Merrill Linn from February 5-7, 1862.

As part of the transcription process, I found it most helpful to have both the diary entry I was transcribing and my actual transcription side by side on the screen. This allowed me to easily read the document and type the words I saw in his diary entry. At first, I read the document straight through and left question marks where I found words illegible. I went back through the entire document and tried to fill in the question marks as much as possible. I realized that context is crucial when transcribing illegible words. For instance, once I realized that Linn was mostly discussing his boating experiences, I would google some of the letters in a certain word I could not read. If the results connected to boating and the Civil War, I knew that the word I found illegible fit well in that specific context.

In this example, I transcribed this sentence as “There are ? had fisheries here.” Because Linn was talking about fisheries, I realized that he must be talking about something relevant to fish. I googled the letters I found legible which were “findshad” and a link said that Shad was a type of fish. This helped me come to the conclusion that the illegible word as actually two separate words of “fine Shad”.

Additionally, working with a partner was extremely helpful because it gave me a new perspective and different interpretation of certain phrases and words. Some words that I found illegible, Mary could read and interpret and vice versa. We both read each other’s documents out loud, which helped us hear any words that did not fit in the context of the diary entry.

In this example, I transcribed this phrase as “The Dinkie (the Union) black”, which did not make any sense whatsoever. When Mary read this phrase, she has heard of “the Union block” and we googled it. As a result, the Union block was a term used during the Civil War. Therefore, I corrected my mistake from “black” to “block”. By having a different perspective, Mary helped me by not only correcting a transcription mistake, but she also put this sentence into its correct context.