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• 1 media/Bayle Dictionary v4 p 2751 Brock SpecColl Vignette Effect.jpg 2022-09-20T14:04:08+00:00 Entering the Archive: How to Read Early Modern Books and Manuscripts 78 An introduction to Palaeography and Transcribing Early Modern Texts image_header 2024-08-23T19:17:02+00:00

  This Week's Big Question

  How do we decipher, transcribe, and make sense of archival manuscripts and Early Modern printed texts?

  This Week's Big Challenge

  This week we begin to practice some of the less celebrated, but ultimately very rewarding skills that historians possess.  We are entering the "archives" to examine a manuscript and compare it to its published version. We will be rejoining Sonja Boon as she enters the archives for her own research, and use her as a guide for our own explorations.
  
  In order answer this week's big question, you will need to be able to read manuscripts and early modern texts in their original form. So this week, we will practice transcribing them in the forums.
  
  To "transcribe" means to reproduce someone else's writing in modern form.

  Audio Introduction

  • For a basic introduction to archives and archival research, listen to: Drumney, Peter. “How Archives Work.” Produced by Adam McNeil. Doing History. February 17, 2020. Podcast. 45:41. 

  Learning Outcomes

  • Be able to transcribe one page of cursive writing as well as a single page from an early modern text, so that you will feel confident reading other early modern books in the weeks to come;
  • Analyze the contents of "Narrative of a Five Years Expedition" so that you practice the skills of close reading, contextualization, corroboration, and sourcing.
  • Practice assessing the line between errors an omissions in early modern texts.
  • Explore how the digitization of archival material affects the archive experience, the research process, and historians approach studying history...What can be gained? What might be lost?

  Background

  This week, we enter the archives with you! Since we are not meeting in person, our exercises this week are designed first to help you think about what archives are, why they matter, and how historians use them; and second to give you the opportunity to slow down and work with a few specific documents as you might encounter them while visiting an archive. Before you begin the learning activities, however, pause and listen to the podcast on How Archives Work, and read Sonja Boon's description of her archival experiences in Chapters 4 or 8 of What the Oceans Remember. Let her description of the sites, sounds, and textures of different archives guide you as you digitally engage with your primary sources!
  
  Our primary material this week involves a small section from  2 versions of a memoir by John Stedman. The title of the text that you will read is " A Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam" (it is part of a larger book -- and that book is the subject of your first assignment). In these pages Stedman writes about his observations in the newly acquired English colony of Surinam. It is important that you read the version text provided by links on this page and not others, because one of the most important learning outcomes for this week is that you should learn how to read early modern books in the format that they were printed in originally. As the course progresses, we will be providing you with lots of sources that are only available in this form, so if you do not learn the basic skills of reading these texts now, you will be at a real disadvantage later in the course!
  
  But, wait, you may ask, why does transcribing even matter??
  
  In many cases, when you visit an archive, photography may not be permitted!! This is rapidly changing, but not universally. So, how do you remember what you read in the archives? You transcribe it. This ensures you have an accurate record for future use. One of my first archival adventures as an undergraduate led me to the private archives of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, where I was ushered into a tiny, unheated room in the basement, the muniment room, which was piled with documents and papers. My visit required arranging several weeks ahead of time, and I was granted access to the room for only a few hours.  Cameras were not permitted in the room, but I needed to glean as much information from what I could read in as short a time as possible. Note-taking skills were definitely important then, but in order to have useful tidbits of information to bring my research alive, transcribing the letters I found was critical to advancing my research!  While a strict adherence to the no camera rule is no longer thanks to the advent of digital photography, it does remain very prevalent. So, what do you with box full of historical treasures in the archives?  You transcribe them, so that you can refer back to them when you write up your research!
  
  But, this is not the only reason historians transcribe documents. Increasingly, historians are engaging with digital tools to help them approach documents in new ways. Many of these tools use OCR (optical character recognition) software to identify key words and phrases. This software was designed to read contemporary text, however, which means that many of the documents that historians encounter remain either illegible, or mistranslated by these tools. We want to introduce you to TWO types of documents that you may need to transcribe, manuscripts, and early modern printed texts. Both offer their unique challenges, and in today's world, when many of you may not have been introduced to cursive writing, this week may prove to be very challenging!
  
  There are several links in the Toolbox section of the lesson to helpful resources for deciphering both. Take some time to explore them all!  The Library from the University of Hull, UK provides samples of several styles of Early Modern handwriting, and I might suggest that Stedman's manuscript is later italic with some remnants of secretary hand.
  
  
  
  
  
   

  A Practical (and Humorous) Introduction to Reading Early Modern Books

  
  Take a look at this  excerpt with the help of Devon Eastland's helpful introduction from last year (2020) to reading older English books. (It's on your list of supplementary materials for this week). The title of Eastland's essay is "Why do old books use F's instead of S's?" Eastland's answer is that they don't. The confusion is a mistake on the inexperienced reader's part.
  
  If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t.  Some of the older versions of the letter "s" look more like what we would call an "f". Look closely. Can you see that that there is a horizontal bar that goes all the way through both sides of the "f", but if there's any horizontal bar on an old-fashioned "s" it's only to the left-hand side of the letter. In other words, the two letters are NOT the same. This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f".
  
  So, why do we care? As historians increasingly employ digital tools to read texts, they have discovered that the "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR  computer programs. You will be introduced to one of these programs in our later assignments, Voyant Tools.  By contrast, our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because we can usually figure out what these words should be (our minds do a kind of auto-correction, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look). While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging -- some even that work with handwritten manuscripts (Transkribus) -- at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts as well as we can.
  
  When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, tried to "read" the Whitefield passage we include above, it rendered it as this: As you can see, the computer program added a significant number of mistakes -- so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this older information can’t help us here.
  
  You can do a much better job yourself. Your first step toward this goal is to recognize that we have all kinds of confusing letters and numbers that we do not confuse when we read. Look at these combinations:
  • 1 vs l (the number vs the letter);
  • 0 vs O (again, the number [zero] vs the letter [capital o]);
  • rn vs m (two letters [r and n] vs one letter, a distinction that some OCR computer programs find difficult to make).
  
  When you read early modern books in English (and in many other languages that use a Latin alphabet, too), the letters that readers often mix up (but you should not) are:
  • f and s;
  • u and v;
  • i and j.
  
  The biggest confusions come with f's and s's. Remember that fonts have histories. They have changed over the generations, sometimes significantly. Don't let these changes give you a "fhit sit!" These two non-words in quotation marks would be an incorrect way of reading and transcribing an imaginary text. We won't correct the mistake, but you should not make this kind of mistake in your reading of early modern texts! Don't panic! Read the words that are actually on the page. Don't let the older fonts confuse you. You should not change the spelling that the original writers used (even if that spelling is not correct by modern standards), but you should also not introduce mistakes that the original writers never meant to make!
  
  Let's practice with that 1745 passage from George Whitefield. Read it slowly, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes that the computer made.  The corrected version and proper transcription of the passage from 1745 is:

  YOUR last sweet Letter was very savoury
  to my Taste. It brought God to my
  Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
  you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
  of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
  ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
  that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
  much Good, has the Lord made you to my
  poor Soul!

  This kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training.  It requires you to slow down and read carefully.  Yes, this passage is strange, but making sense of this strangeness is the kind of challenge that historians try to grapple with.  We know that confronting this challenge takes time and is not easy. We sympathize: Most of you have full schedules, with jobs, domestic responsibilities, and university courses.  You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly -- you just need to get through as much of the material as possible. We professors do that, too; sometimes we even recommend "strategic reading" as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials.  But in research we often need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on. 
  
  Pondering what's going on is especially important these days. After all, we're living in the middle of pandemic, which makes life more uncertain! Learning to read slooooooowly, and carefully, and thoughtfully are what we are practising often in this course, and certainly this week, too.

  Learning Activities (This lesson is VERY "hands on", so plan your time carefully, and start EARLY!!!)

  • Start with the Secondary sources...listen to the podcast, and read Sonja Boon. They will give you some context for the archival work historians do!
  • Then, read Chapter 2 of John Stedman's Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam.
  • For your initial forum contribution transcribe a page from Chapter 2 of John Stedman's Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, AND transcribe the corresponding page from the manuscript version of John Stedman's Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam.
    • Avoid transcribing the first page!  Read through the chapter, and choose a page that sounds interesting to you. Transcribe it!
    • Pay attention to the page numbers because they will not be the same as the printed version, so look for key words, and phrases that connect the two documents. They will help you find the matching pages! Now...Transcribe it!
    • Once you have your transcriptions, briefly describe the passage ( include the page numbers, some information about what's going on in the text and how it relates to the topic of the chapter ), then explain how the manuscript and printed versions differ, and finally, why this is significant. Maybe they are exactly the same, but in most cases they differ, at least a little bit!
    • Avoid transcribing a page that other students have already transcribed. This means you will need to be checking the forums to see what others have already contributed before you begin!
    • In many obvious ways, the manuscript and textual version of Stedman's Narrative differ.  Explore why this might be, and how historians might account for these differences
  • Then in your first response Connect or compare your passage with at least one other passage that others in your group have added to the forum discussion. Read the transcriptions that other students have posted to your forum discussion, and check several of them against the original text and manuscript by Stedman. If you find mistakes in the transcriptions that others have posted, suggest corrections, kindly.
    • The purpose of this exercise is for you and your forum colleagues to help one another improve your reading ability, so please provide corrections in a positive and encouraging way, and ask questions of each other if you're not sure how to transcribe a passage.
  • Finally, in a third post, reflect on Sonja Boon's and Peter Drumney's discussion of historians' experiences in archives. Consider your exercise this week as a virtual archival experience. Reflect on your transcribing experience with reference to Boon and Drumney.
  So yes, you read that correctly...you will be required to post at least THREE times in this lesson, so plan your time wisely!

  
  Toolbox

  Here are some useful websites to help you read Early Modern handwriting. Use them to help you read through Stedman. They are not intended to be mini-courses for you, rather resources to help you when you get stuck.  Choose the one that helps you the best, they are all good!
  • Palaeography at The National Archives UK
  • English Handwriting Online 1500-1700 at Cambridge University
  • Quarantine Reading:Learning to Read Secretary Hand by Kathryn James at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
  For an introduction to transcribing Early Modern Texts, visit:
  
  • Devon Eastland, "Why Do Old Books Use F's instead of S's?" Swann Auction Galleries (April 2020) (https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/early-printed-books/2020/04/why-do-old-books-use-fs-instead-of-ss/);
    
     

  Primary Sources

  • John Stedman Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam Manuscript
  • John Stedman Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam Printed Version

  Secondary Sources

  • For a description of the experience of travelling to, working in, and the challenges of brick and mortar archives, read: Boon, Sonja. What the Oceans Remember : Searching for Belonging and Home. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019. (Choose to read either chapter four or eight, or both if you have time! Chapter Four introduces you to some of the highlights of onsite archival research, and Chapter Eight, some of the challenges.)
  • For a basic introduction to archives and archival research, listen to: Drumney, Peter. “How Archives Work.” Produced by Adam McNeil. Doing History. February 17, 2020. Podcast. 45:41. 
  Supplemental Materials
  • Full version of John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam can be viewed in the following locations: for the print edition, Archive.org, and a digitized copy of the manuscript edition is available through the University of Minnesota archives. For the very brave, you can find Stedman's handwritten journals here!
• 1 media/Defoe jacket.jpeg 2020-07-08T16:08:11+00:00 How to Read an Early Modern Book 56 The Pandemic Edition (2021-22) (under construction) image_header 2022-09-07T02:01:22+00:00

  This Week's Big Question

  How did an early modern journalist and novelist named Daniel Defoe portray life in London in the 1660s when the Bubonic Plague was spreading there?

  This Week's Big Challenge

  To answer this big question, you will need to be able to read early modern texts in their original form. To learn how to read these texts, you will practice transcribing them.
  
  To "transcribe" means to reproduce someone else's writing in modern form.
  Take a look at the text above. It is sampled from 4 different early modern English books. To transcribe this text sample, we would record the following:

  • Transcrib-ing Early MODERN Sources

  
  Why should this first word be "Transcrib-ing" and not "Tranfcrib-ing"? Your task for this week is to learn the answer, and in the process to become comfortable reading early modern books in their original form. In other words, you should learn how to transcribe the printed versions of early modern books.

  Video Introduction

  • none this week

  Learning Outcomes

  • Be able to read 20 pages from the original page reproductions of an early modern book ("Memoirs of the Plague"), so that you will feel confident reading other early modern books in the weeks to come;
  • Analyze the contents of "Memoirs of the Plague" so that you practice the skills of close reading, contextualization, corroboration, and sourcing -- and the interpretation of significance;
  • Discover more about the history of early modern London and England;
  • Practice assessing the line between fact and fiction in historical writing.

  Questions to Consider, and Learning Activities

  • In each of your forum contributions transcribe one or more sentences from "Memoirs of the Plague" by Daniel Defoe, explain where in the text this passage is from (page number and some information about what's going on in the text there), and explain why it is significant.
    • Make sure that the passage you transcribe is NOT one that other students have already transcribed.
    • Connect or compare your passage with at least one other passage that others in your group have added to the forum discussion.
  • Read the transcriptions that other students have posted to your forum discussion, and check several of them against the original text by Defoe. If you find mistakes in the transcriptions that others have posted, suggest corrections.
    • The purpose of this exercise is to get you and your discussion colleagues to help each other improve your reading ability, so please provide corrections in a positive and encouraging way, and ask questions of each other if you're not sure of a passage.
  • We have seen two maps of early modern London in the last Lesson (see the Supplemental Materials there). Try practising source comparison by pointing to places on the maps of London that Defoe discusses in his "Memoirs of the Plague". Are there any?
    • What is the significance of your findings, if any?
  • Can you find evidence that Defoe was lying or embellishing facts about his experiences or life in London? In other words, is this his journalistic account of the plague, or someone else's, or a completely invented account?
    • Can you find evidence that Defoe's accounts of life in London in the 1660s were truthful or reliable?
    • Does it matter for historians whether Defoe was writing a novel (i.e., a fictional story) or a journalistic (i.e., truthful) account of events?

  Background

  Today we think of journalists as people who chronicle the real and true events of their times. Accuracy and truthfulness in reporting are certainly among the main values that journalists today strive for, but these are values that are increasingly under suspicion. Twenty-four hour news stations feel obligated to produce enough content to fill the hours, a pressure which can lead to sloppy reporting. To make matters worse, there are active disinformation campaigns (also sometimes called propaganda) that exploit the growing need for content in the constant flow of news. And then there are the complications that come from the popularity of social media discussions, since people sometimes share disinformation and misinformation unwittingly.
  
  Today (in 2021) we are reading and hearing and watching news everyday about the progress of a pandemic and about the Canadian Federal Election. Amid the health crisis and political debates, we are also experiencing a crisis of trust in the sources of information that help guide us through the world. Some politicians have even charged that all unfavourable news is "fake news." In these worrying times, it is sometimes difficult to tell who to trust.
  
  Historical studies might be able to help us learn how to deal with the flood of information. The reason is that in courses such as HIST 2F90 you learn how to analyze sources. The skills that you have started to practice in this course so far (for example: close reading, corroboration, contextualization, and sourcing) are really good foundations for thinking critically not only about sources from the past but also sources from today. For example, once we source a document and ask "Who is the author?" we can ask the further step and ask: "Can we trust that author?"
  
  This is among the questions that you can keep in mind when you read Daniel Defoe's "Memoirs of the Plague." Daniel Defoe is sometimes described as an early journalist. Furthermore, what we consider journalism today traces its roots to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, since that is when newspapers in a form that is recognizable to us started to establish themselves in places like London, Amsterdam, and Paris. However, Defoe was also an early writer of novels. Keep this in mind when you watch the first few minutes of Robert McCrum's video introduction to Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (note that McCrum starts by discussing another earlier novel: Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan):
  
  Pay particular attention to McCrum's statements about Defoe's attitudes toward fact and fiction!
  
  For this week we will be focusing on a different book by Daniel Defoe. The title of the text that you will read is "Memoirs of the Plague" (it is part of a larger book -- and that book is the subject of your first assignment). In these pages Defoe writes about the Great Plague of London that happened just before another disaster: the Great Fire of London of 1666! You should read at least the first 20 pages of the Google Books version of Defoe's text (but you may read more for this lesson, and you must read some more for the assignment). It is important that you read this version and not others, because one of the most important learning outcomes for this week is that you should learn how to read early modern books in the format that they were printed in originally. As the course progresses, we will be providing you with lots of sources that are only available in this form, so if you do not learn the basic skills of reading these texts now, you will be at a real disadvantage later in the course!

  A Practical (and Humorous) Introduction to Reading Early Modern Books

  A scene from the long-running BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007) illustrates really effectively the kind of problems that you might have when you try reading older books. In this scene, the somewhat slow but sweet-hearted Alice Tinker (played brilliantly by Emma Chambers) tries to read several Bible verses (supposedly from the Song of Solomon) in a church service. The trouble is, she is using an antique Bible that the parish church has received. She is not familiar with it, and the Bible she is reading from uses an older style of typography (i.e., early modern fonts). Here's the excerpt from episode 2 of the sitcom's first season:
  
  If you are worried and distressed because you are not sure what "succour" means, put on your researcher's hat and help yourself out! Provide yourself some succour!
  
  We found this excerpt with the help of Devon Eastland's helpful introduction from last year (2020) to reading older English books. It's on your list of secondary sources for this week. The title of Eastland's essay is "Why do old books use F's instead of S's?" Eastland's answer is that they don't. The confusion is a mistake on the inexperienced reader's part.
  
  Let's look closely at the example of a pamphlet from 1745 by the British Protestant preacher and missionary, George Whitefield. It will give us a chance to look ahead to some themes later in the course, but its main purpose here is to get us to practice reading old texts.
  Whitefield is very interesting to us in this course because as he was a British-born writer who travelled frequently to America and commented on many major questions of the day. Most notably, he was a major critic of the manner in which slaves were treated. It is interesting and perhaps also perplexing for us today to note that while he condemned slave masters, he was not an abolitionist (a person who advocated for the end to slavery).  He criticized the ways slaves were treated, not the fact that they were slaves.  We can -- and we will in other Modules in this course! -- compare Whitefield's writing with others who debated the political, economic, and moral implications of the trade in human beings. For now, however, this brief passage from Whitefield's writings is merely an example of early modern fonts.
  
  If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t.  Some of the older versions of the letter "s" look more like what we would call an "f". Look closely. Can you see that that there is a horizontal bar that goes all the way through both sides of the "f", but if there's any horizontal bar on an old-fashioned "s" it's only to the left-hand side of the letter. In other words, the two letters are NOT the same. This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f". The "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR (optical character recognition) computer programs. By contrast, our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because we can usually figure out what these words should be (our minds do a kind of auto-correction, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look). While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging -- some even that work with handwritten manuscripts -- at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts as well as we can.
  
  When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, tried to "read" the Whitefield passage we include above, it rendered it as this:
  You can probably imagine poor, sweet Alice Tinker doing about the same hatchet-job to this passage. As you can see, the computer program added a significant number of mistakes -- so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this older information can’t help us here.
  
  You can do a much better job yourself. Your first step toward this goal is to recognize that we have all kinds of confusing letters and numbers that we do not confuse when we read. Look at these combinations:
  • 1 vs l (the number vs the letter);
  • 0 vs O (again, the number [zero] vs the letter [capital o]);
  • rn vs m (two letters [r and n] vs one letter, a distinction that some OCR computer programs find difficult to make).
  
  When you read early modern books in English (and in many other languages that use a Latin alphabet, too), the letters that readers often mix up (but you should not) are:
  • f and s;
  • u and v;
  • i and j.
  
  The biggest confusions come with f's and s's. Remember that fonts have histories. They have changed over the generations, sometimes significantly. Don't let these changes give you a "fhit sit!" These two non-words in quotation marks would be an incorrect way of reading and transcribing an imaginary text. We won't correct the mistake, but you should not make this kind of mistake in your reading of early modern texts! Don't panic! Read the words that are actually on the page. Don't let the older fonts confuse you. You should not change the spelling that the original writers used (even if that spelling is not correct by modern standards), but you should also not introduce mistakes that the original writers never meant to make!
  
  Let's practice with that 1745 passage from George Whitefield. Read it slowly, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes that the computer made.  The corrected version and proper transcription of the passage from 1745 is:

  YOUR last sweet Letter was very savoury
  to my Taste. It brought God to my
  Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
  you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
  of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
  ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
  that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
  much Good, has the Lord made you to my
  poor Soul!

  This kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training.  It requires you to slow down and read carefully.  Yes, this passage is strange, but making sense of this strangeness is the kind of challenge that historians try to grapple with.  We know that confronting this challenge takes time and is not easy. We sympathize: Most of you have full schedules, with jobs, domestic responsibilities, and university courses.  You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly -- you just need to get through as much of the material as possible. We professors do that, too; sometimes we even recommend "strategic reading" as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials.  But in research we often need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on. 
  
  Pondering what's going on is especially important these days. After all, we're living in the middle of pandemic, which makes life more uncertain! Learning to read slooooooowly, and carefully, and thoughtfully are what we are practising often in this course, and certainly this week, too.

  Toolbox

  One of this lesson's main tasks is for you to analyze the contents of "Memoirs of the Plague." When you do this you will be practising the skills of close reading, contextualization, corroboration, and sourcing that we started applying in the previous lessons. For this week, there is also one further historical thinking skill that you you start practising -- interpretation of significance.
  
  To learn about significance, read the short introduction at http://historicalthinking.ca/historical-significance. Try to think of ways that you can establish the significance of the sources and evidence that you read and discuss this week -- and every week.
   

  Secondary Sources

  • Devon Eastland, "Why Do Old Books Use F's instead of S's?" Swann Auction Galleries (April 2020) (https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/early-printed-books/2020/04/why-do-old-books-use-fs-instead-of-ss/);
  • Ben Johnson, "The Great Plague 1665 -- the Black Death," from Historic UK (no date) (https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Great-Plague/).
   

  Primary Sources

  • Daniel Defoe, "Memoirs of the Plague," https://books.google.ca/books?id=-iZcAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1&hl=de&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false\
    • NOTE: We have provided only partial bibliographical information here, so that you have to try your best to figure out what you can about the perspective and date of the text; make sure you "source" this document, when you discuss it in your forums;
    • Also make sure that you read this version of the text and refer to the page numbers in this version of the text. The reason is that this version and these page numbers will help everybody "stay on the same page".

  
  Supplemental Materials

  * coming soon
   
• 1 media/Bayle Dictionary v4 p 2751 Brock SpecColl Vignette Effect.jpg 2016-06-28T20:20:12+00:00 Transcription Workshop 42 Transcribing Early Modern Sources image_header 2019-10-08T18:55:31+00:00

  
  

  Last updated: 2 Oct. 2019

  This Week's Big Task

  For each Lesson we provide you with a Big Question to think and write about. Workshops are different. In this and all other Workshops you'll have a main activity, a Big Task. For the First Workshop your Big Task is:

  Learn how to read and transcribe original, printed eighteenth-century sources about the slave trade.

  Learning Outcomes

  By the end of this week you should be able to:
  • Easily and accurately read early modern printed sources in their original fonts;
  • Correctly transcribe several pages from eighteenth-century books that we provide.

  Learning Activities

  To accomplish your Big Task for the Workshop, you will first:
  • read the Background and Instructions below;
  and then use the Transcription Tool in Sakai to:
  • Transcribe 3 groups of 5 pages from eighteenth-century books (the Transcription Tool assigns these pages to you);
  • and then in the Forum write a 100-200 word summary of the text that you transcribe in Part C.
  There are Instructions at the end of this webpage.

  NOTE from Oct. 2019: The task of writing a summary of your last transcribed section is a new step that was not outlined in the earlier versions of this page.

  Background

  In the First Module you learned not only about early modern European history, but also about the importance of sources for historians. In the Second Module you will take another step in working with sources from the European past. This step is learning to read early modern books in their original fonts. Once you master this skill a new and expanded world of sources will open up to you.
  
  There are several challenges to reading primary sources from long-past cultures. First and foremost, most if not all of you have noticed that the beliefs of people from the past can seem very strange to us. This makes them challenging to interpret -- and this is a challenge all historians face all the time. "The past," a famous novelist (L.P. Hartley) once said, "is like a foreign country: people did things differently there." The Second Module will introduce you to one of the best examples of this foreignness: slavery. In this First Workshop (the starting exercise for the Module) you will work with several eighteenth-century sources in which authors debate the abolition of the slave trade. These texts will become a major subject of your work in the course -- in fact, they'll eventually be the subject of your major course writing project in the Second Term.
  
  The topic of the slave trade is one of the most powerful and morally challenging stories in human history. It's the story of the forced relocation of millions of people, the barbarous reduction of human beings to property, and extraordinary levels of violence required to sustain it. It compels us to examine both why it was allowed to occur, and the meaning of the struggle to end it. In particular, this year we'll be working with four eighteenth-century pamphlets. In Britain in the 1780s, the debate on the slave trade was intense, and a range of positions emerged. Many writers defended the trade, some emphasizing its economic benefits, while others maintained that the trade had a positive moral effect on African "heathens". Some criticized the trade, arguing that it was barbaric, un-Christian and debased the entire nation. Others criticized the cruel treatment of the slaves, or the trade in human property, but did not wholly condemn the institution of slavery itself, only how it was conducted. Over the remainder of the term, we'll work to understand that debate while working with a small number of particular sources.
  
  The Workshop will also introduce you to a second, more technical challenge of reading primary sources that historians face: reading old documents in their original forms. Most of the sources you read as students are pre-processed for you. This processing involves transcribing them into modern print or digital formats. So far we've been reading sources that are available in easy-to-read modern styles of print -- at least, the letters are easy to read. This doesn't make the content any easier, and you'll also have noticed that old-fashioned styles of English require more concentration to understand. To read these sources, we have to slow down and pay close attention to the words and sentences. We have to practice close reading (see the Toolbox entries from Module 1).
  
  Interestingly, when we slow down to read, we give ourselves a chance to read with more care, to examine the words, and their meanings, more space to contemplate what they're saying. We should always read carefully, but reading old texts means that we simply have to be careful if we are to understand that they say.
  
  The "secrets" of these kinds of sources (i.e., older books) are the ones that we want to help you unlock.
  
  Building a Usable Early Modern Database

  One of the most exciting parts of this course is that you will be contributing significant research to a real online historical database. And you’ll be part of a team producing a database that you will use in this course, and that other historians around the world will be able to utilize for years to come. You will use the sources in the database to practice your skills of close reading (which you've already begun to learn about in Module 1) and "distant" reading (which we will introduce you to in Module 3). Unlike close reading, distant reading requires digitized, machine-readable versions of the sources.

  We're working primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this course (especially Modules 3-5). Because Brock University is located in a small city like St. Catharines with a fairly small university library, until very recently very few of the primary sources from that era would have been available to us. The internet has changed that. Digitization has meant that thousands of versions of old books are now available in photographic reproductions of the actual pages. That's great, of course, because it means we suddenly have much more material available for us to see. But the problem is that much of this material isn’t available in forms that we can use with digital research tools, the kind of tools that make distant reading possible. Most of the tools that are available for historians require text that is machine readable; that is, the text needs to be recognizable to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, if it is going to be transcribed in an automated way. For modern books, that presents a few difficulties, but not too many.  For older books, especially ones using fonts and styles that we don’t use any more, that presents lots of problems.
  Look at the opening paragraph from a 1745 pamphlet written by George Whitefield, an Anglican evangelical preacher.  Whitefield is very interesting to us in this course because as he was a British-born writer who travelled frequently to America and commented on many major questions of the day. Most notably, he was a major critic of the manner in which slaves were treated.  Interestingly, while he condemned slave masters, he was not an abolitionist (a person who advocated for the end to slavery).  He criticized the ways slaves were treated, not the fact that they were slaves.  His writings, therefore, offer a nice point of comparison with not only someone who felt slavery should be abolished, but also someone who wholly supported slavery.  We can -- and we will! -- compare Whitefield's writing with others who debated the political, economic, and moral implications of the trade in human beings.  One way to compare those writings is to read them both carefully and closely. We will practice this, but we will also try other ways of read using digital tools. The advantage of digital techniques is that they allow us to read large amounts of text and thus often find patterns that may not be visible while reading them closely and carefully. In effect, we will not only be comparing texts but also comparing ways of reading them.
  
  In this Workshop, you'll be working collaboratively to prepare four texts on slavery from 1784, 1785, 1788, and 1789 for use in your later workshops and assignments. Later in the term, we’ll be analyzing those cleaned-up texts using a text analysis program called Voyant Tools. At that point, you'll be able to form your own conclusions about the comparative benefits of traditional close reading of texts versus new distant reading.

  Reading and Transcribing Eighteenth-Century Fonts
  
  The first step in the process is our task for this First Workshop: transcribing the books you'll work with later in the course. For now, to get started, take another look at the excerpt from Whitefield's 1745 pamphlet (above).

  If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t.  Some of the older versions of the letter "s" look more like what we would call an "f". Look closely. Can you see that that there is a horizontal bar that goes all the way through both sides of the "f", but if there's any horizontal bar on a "s" it's only to the left-hand side of the letter. In other words, the two letters are NOT the same. This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f". The "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR readers, and as you'll see there are lots of other unusual features of these fonts.  Our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because our mind knows what these words should be (our minds do a kind of autocorrect, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look). While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging -- some even that work with handwritten manuscripts -- at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts. 

  When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, tried to "read" the Whitefield passage we include above, it rendered it as this:
  As you can see, there are a significant number of mistakes in this passage -- so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text in other computer programs. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this information can’t help us here.

  We can fix the problem.  Our first step toward this goal is that we need to go through the texts, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes.  The corrected version and proper transcription of the passage from 1745 is:

  YOUR last sweet Letter was very savoury
  to my Taste. It brought God to my
  Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
  you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
  of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
  ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
  that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
  much Good, has the Lord made you to my
  poor Soul!

  This kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training.  First, it requires you to slow down and read carefully.  We know: most of you have full schedules, many combining jobs, domestic responsibilities, and a full academic schedule.  You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly -- you just need to get through as much of the material as possible.  We professors do that too; sometimes we even recommend "strategic reading" as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials.  But in research we often need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on. 
  
  This week's exercise in transcription forces us to do just that.  We’ll all need to read … each … word … carefully … and … thoughtfully.  Is it spelled correctly?  Is it the right word? Is it spelled consistently? Is it a word at all? How did a blotch on the page of the original document that we’re looking at in jpg-format get converted into a word?  And as we ask questions like these, we’ll be preparing the text, we’ll be reading it carefully, and we’ll be thinking about its meaning.

  Second, this exercise in transcription and slow reading acquaints you with the process of doing research.  As a student, you most often encounter primary sources in a package that’s already out of context.  Usually, it’s been transcribed and (re)published in a book, a textbook, a collection of some sort.  It’s been packaged for you.  Here, you'll be getting something raw, a digital image of a real unprocessed eighteenth-century text, and you'll get the opportunity to read it but also make it more useful for further research.  You, each of you, will be making a real contribution to historical scholarship; each of you will work through a few pages of the documents, make them usable and public, and later you'll craft your own historical analysis of them.

  Instructions

  You're going to use a Transcription Tool in Sakai to do your work for this Workshop. The Tool is very easy to use. But you have to pay attention to the instructions for inputting data correctly. 
  
  The workshop takes place in three stages (A, B, and C). You do them in order, one after the other.

  • Task A is to transcribe 5 pages of text from one of our 18th-century sources. You won’t have to choose anything; the tool will assign the pages to you.
  • Task B is to transcribe a second set of 5 pages of text from our 18th-century sources. (These 5 pages will already have been transcribed by someone else in Task A. The 5 pages you transcribed in Task A will be assigned to someone else in Task B.)
  • Task C is to look at the work of two of your classmates. Working with a third 5-page section, you will compare and correct the transcriptions of two of your classmates (their work in Tasks A and B) so that we might produce a clean and correct transcription. (Again, the Tool will assign these pages to you.)

  You must complete your A and B transcriptions by the end of the day on Monday, October 21, 2019. The comparative transcription (C) is due by the end of the day on Thursday, October 31, 2019.  You may start as soon as you have finished reading the instructions. Note that you may have to be patient in completing Task C, since it requires that enough students have completed Tasks A and B. Therefore, you will help yourself and everyone else in the class if you complete Tasks A and B as soon as you can.

  Tasks A and B of the Workshop are very straight-forward: go to the Transcription Tool in Sakai (see the image below). You can find it by using the link, or by going to the Tools menu in Sakai. There you'll see three buttons.  Click the first button (A) and that will take you to a screen with two windows. One is an image of a single page from original 18th-century book (which the tool will assign to you -- you won't have to choose anything -- it will simply be there); the other is the window in which you'll type the clean, transcribed, digital version.

  You will transcribe the text one page at a time.

  • At the end of each page, choose "Next" at the top to move to the next page, and so on until you have finished the assigned 5 pages (you can also choose "Previous" if you wish to go back to review your work).
  • To save your current work, press "Save".
  • You can go back to the Overview page by pressing "Back" (but don't forget to save changes first!).
  • When your 5 pages are done, and you're satisfied with the result, press "Save and Mark as Done" to submit your transcript for review. After you do this, you will no longer be able to make edits!
  • You can then move on to the second window (B) where you'll transcribe 5 more pages [i.e. 5 new pages that the tool will choose for you].
  • You can then begin C (instructions below).

  To be clear, at no point will you have to choose a text. When you go to the Transcription Tool, the tool assigns a 5-page section to you at each stage (A, B, and C).
   

  Please make sure to follow the instructions above. If you accidentally click "Save and Mark as Done" before your work is actually done, you will have to write to the Instructor Role in Sakai Messages to request that your work be reset.

  
  When everyone has completed the Transcription Workshop, the program will reassemble the pamphlets with their fresh, new, clean, digital text formats!
  
  The 4 books you'll work together to transcribe are:

  • An Answer to the Reverend James Ramsay’s Essay, on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves, in the British Sugar Colonies. By Some Gentleman of St. Christopher. Basseterre in St. Christopher, 1784.
  • Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies. By a Friend to the West India Colonies, and Their Inhabitants. [London], 1785.
  • Hector MacNeill, Observations on the Treatment of the Negroes, in the Island of Jamaica. Liverpool, [1788].
  • No Abolition; or, an Attempt to Prove to the Conviction of Every Rational British Subject, That the Abolition of the British Trade with Africa for Negroes, Would Be a Measure as Unjust as Impolitic, Fatal to the Interests of This Nation, Ruinous to Its Sugar Colonies, and More or Less Pernicious in Its Consequences to Every Description of the People. London, 1789.

  Some details on entering your transcription

  • You need to enter the text one line at a time -- not one sentence at a time, but one line at a time. Thus you need to hit "Enter" [Return] at the end of each line in the original text.
  • ​Enter all headers and footers (for example, titles, page numbers, footnotes, etc.) and give them their own lines.
  • Enter exactly what you see.  If it's spelled in a way that looks to be incorrectly, type it that way anyway. Use the spellings that the author used. But make sure to read the letters correctly (i.e., don't confuse "s"s and "f"s).
  • If a word is in all caps, type it in all CAPS. If there's hyphenation, include the hyphen-ation. You might also see semi-colons [;] printed with spaces before and after ; type it that way.
  • But be careful.  All those "thiftles" are "thistles". So record them properly, since the author is actually using a long s, not an f! But you might find, for example, "chearful" - that's what we would write as "cheerful". Type it as "chearful", since this is the spelling the author used (NOT "chearsal"). And you might find words with what look to us like random capital letter: "It was to my Taste". Type it with the Caps.
  • If you don't see an example here, use your best judgement.  That's where the comparison (Part C) may help us.

  NOTE: There are some passages in the books that may not be in English. Some of these passages even use non-Latin letters at times. When you find phrases or passages on pages that you are transcribing, add [...] (but without the italics or highlighting) to indicate that you have left out some foreign language text. 

  Task C

  The process in Task C is effectively the same as in Tasks A and B. When you open Part C you'll see an image of a piece of 18th-century text and a blank page, just as you did when you transcribed A and B. Above that will be two windows with transcribed text; one labelled A and one labelled B. Those are an A and B transcription completed by two of your classmates. These give you a guide to your transcription work, since the A and B versions are of the page that you are transcribing from the original. (Note: other students will be using your A and B transcriptions.)

  Your task in Part C is to transcribe from the original, just as you did in earlier tasks, but also to use your classmates' versions as guides.  The transcription tool software compares the two texts for you to help you notice differences between the two.  Your job is to examine the text, examine the two transcriptions, and type the corrected (final) version. You'll type that into the blank window, just as you did when you did A and B.

  ​The colours in the previously transcribed versions help you to identify similarities/differences: 

  • If the text background is white, then the two versions agree;
  • if the text background is yellow, that means there is some difference in formatting (punctuation, spacing, returns, etc). 
  • if text background is red (A) or green (B) that means there is some difference in content (words added or omitted, different spellings, etc).
  • The grey areas between lines of text are for appearances only (they separate between the colours).  They do not represent spaces or line breaks entered by your peers; only lines that start with a number represent actual text entered by your peers.

  The idea is that two people have transcribed, and a third is checking. The end result should be good, clean text -- text that we can begin to use with our digital tools.

  Now, start reading and transcribing!

  Slowly.

• 1 media/Bayle Dictionary v4 p 2751 Brock SpecColl Vignette Effect.jpg 2016-09-08T06:22:28+00:00 Workshop (1) 40 Transcribing Early Modern Sources image_header 2016-10-11T16:42:02+00:00

  This Week's Big Task

  For each Lesson we provide you with a Big Question to think and write about. Workshops are different. In this and all other Workshops you'll have a main activity, a Big Task. For the First Workshop your Big Task is:

  Learn how to read and transcribe original, printed eighteenth-century sources about the slave trade.

  Learning Outcomes

  By the end of this week you should be able to:
  • Easily and accurately read early modern printed sources in their original fonts;
  • Correctly transcribe several pages from eighteenth-century books that we provide.

  Learning Activities

  To accomplish your Big Task for the Workshop, you will first:
  • read the Background and Instructions below;
  
  and then use the Transcription Tool in Sakai to:
  • Transcribe 3 groups of 6 pages from eighteenth-century books.
  There are Instructions at the end of this webpage.

  Background

  In the First Module you learned not only about early modern European history, but also about the importance of sources for historians. In the Second Module you will take another step in working with sources from the European past. This step is learning to read early modern books in their original fonts. Once you master this skill a new and expanded world of sources will open up to you.
  
  There are several challenges to reading primary sources from long-past cultures. First and foremost, most if not all of you have noticed that the beliefs of people from the past can seem very strange to us. This makes them challenging to interpret -- and this is a challenge all historians face all the time. The past, a famous historian once said, is like a foreign country: they do things differently there. We'll encounter lots of examples of the foreignness of the past in this course. The Second Module will introduce you to one of the main examples of this foreignness: the European system of slavery. In this First Workshop (the starting exercise for the Module) you will work with several eighteenth-century sources in which authors debate the abolition of the slave trade. These will become a major subject of your work in the course -- in fact, they'll eventually be the subject of your major course writing project.
  
  The topic of the slave trade is one of the most powerful and morally challenging stories in human history. It's the story of the forced relocation of millions of people, the barbarous reduction of human beings to property, and extraordinary levels of violence required to sustain it. It compels us to examine both why it was allowed to occur, and the meaning of the struggle to end it. In particular, this year we'll be working with three eighteenth-century pamphlets debating whether the slave trade should be abolished. In Britain in the 1780s, the debate on the slave trade was intense, and a range of position emerged. Many writers defended the trade, some emphasizing its economic benefits, others maintained that the trade had a positive moral effect on African "heathens". Some criticized the trade, arguing that it was barbaric, un-Christian and debased the entire nation. Others criticized the cruel treatment of the slaves, or the trade in human property, but did not wholly condemn the institution of slavery itself, only how it was conducted. Over the remainder of the term, we'll work to understand that debate while working with these sources.
  
  The Workshop will also introduce you to a second, more technical challenge of reading primary sources that historians face: reading old documents in their original forms. Most of the sources you read as students are pre-processed for you. This processing involves transcribing them into modern print or digital formats. So far we've been reading sources that are available in easy-to-read modern styles of print -- at least, the letters are easy to read. This doesn't make the content any easier, and you'll also have noticed that old-fashioned styles of English require more concentration to understand. To read these sources, we have to slow down and pay close attention to the words and sentences. We have to practice close reading (see the earlier Toolbox entries).
  
  Interestingly, when we slow down to read, we give ourselves a chance to read with more care, to examine the words, and their meanings, more space to contemplate what they're saying. We should always read carefully, but reading old texts means that we simply have to be careful if we are to understand that they say.
  
  The "secrets" of these kinds of sources (i.e., older books) are the ones that we want to help you unlock.
  
  Building a Usable Early Modern Database

  One of the most exciting parts of this course is that you will be contributing significant research to a real online historical database. And you’ll be part of a team producing a database that you will use in this course, and that other historians around the world will be able to utilize for years to come. You will use the sources in the database to practice your skills of close reading (which you've already begun to learn about in Module One) and "distant" reading (which we will introduce you to in Module Three). Unlike close reading, distant reading requires digitized, machine-readable versions of the sources.

  We're working primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this course. Living in a small city like St. Catharines with a fairly small university library means that until very recently very few of the primary sources from that era would have been available to us. The internet has changed that.  Digitization has meant that thousands of versions of old books are now available in photographic reproductions of the actual pages. That's great, of course, because it means we suddenly have much more material available for us to see. But the problem is that much of this material isn’t available in forms that we can use with digital research tools, the kind of tools that make distant reading possible. Most of the tools that are available for historians require text that is machine readable.  That is, the text needs to be recognizable to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, if it is going to be transcribed in an automated way. For modern books, that presents a few difficulties, but not too many.  For older books, especially ones using fonts and styles that we don’t use any more, that presents lots of problems.
  Look at the opening paragraph from a 1745 pamphlet written by George Whitefield, an Anglican evangelical preacher.  Whitefield is very interesting to us in this course because as he was a British-born writer who travelled frequently to America and commented on many major questions of the day. Most notably, he was a major critic of the manner in which slaves were treated.  Interestingly, while he condemned slave masters, he was not an abolitionist (a person who advocated for the end to slavery).  He criticized the ways slaves were treated, not the fact that they were slaves.  His writings, therefore, offer a nice point of comparison with not only someone who felt slavery should be abolished, but also someone who wholly supported slavery.  We can – and we will! – compare Whitefield's writing with others who debated the political, economic, and moral implications of the trade in human beings.  One way to compare those writings is to read them both carefully and closely. We will practice this, but we will also try other ways of read using digital tools. The advantage of digital techniques is that they allow us to read large amounts of text and thus often find patterns that may not be visible while reading them closely and carefully. In effect, we will not only be comparing texts but also comparing ways of reading them. In this Workshop, you'll be preparing some texts on slavery from 1784 for use in your later workshops and assignments. Later in the term, we’ll be analyzing those cleaned-up texts using a text analysis program called Voyant Tools. At that point, you'll be able to form your own conclusions about the comparative benefits of traditional close reading of texts versus new distant reading.

  Reading and Transcribing Eighteenth-Century Fonts
  
  The first step in the process is our task for this First Workshop: transcribing the books you'll work with later in the course. For now, to get started, take another look at the excerpt from Whitefield's 1745 pamphlet (above).

  If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t.  But some of their versions of the letter "s" looks more like what we would call an "f". This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f"! The "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR readers, and as you'll see there are lots of other unusual features of these fonts.  Our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because our mind knows what these words should be (our minds do a kind of autocorrect, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look).  While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging – some even that work with handwritten manuscripts – at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts. 

  These texts need to be converted into standardized, machine-readable forms, if we are going to be able to read them with computers.  But even that presents the same problem because the conversion usually utilizes scanners and computers.  When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, looked at this same Whitefield passage it rendered it as this:
  As you can see, there are a significant number of mistakes in this passage - so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text in a digital reading tool. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this information can’t help us here.

  But we can fix it.  Our first step toward this goal is that we need to go through the texts, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes.  The corrected version of the passage from 1745 is:

  YOUR last sweet Letter was very savoury
  to my Taste. It brought God to my
  Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
  you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
  of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
  ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
  that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
  much Good, has the Lord made you to my
  poor Soul!

  This kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training.  First, it requires you to slow down and read carefully.  We know: most of you have full schedules, many combining jobs, domestic responsibilities, and a full academic schedule.  You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly – you just need to get through as much of the material as possible.  We professors do that too; sometimes we even recommend it as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials.  But in research we all need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on. 
  
  This week's exercise in transcription forces us to do just that.  We’ll all need to read … each … word … carefully … and … thoughtfully.  Is it spelled correctly?  Is it the right word? Is it spelled consistently? Is it a word at all? How did that blotch on the page of the original document that we’re looking at in jpg-format get converted into a word?  And as we ask questions like these, we’ll be preparing the text, we’ll be reading it carefully, and we’ll be thinking about its meaning.

  Second, this exercise in transcription and slow reading acquaints you with the process of doing research.  As a student, you most often encounter primary sources in a package that’s already out of context.  Usually, it’s been transcribed and (re)published in a book, a textbook, a collection of some sort.  It’s been packaged for you.  Here, you'll be getting something raw, a digital image of a real unprocessed eighteenth-century text, and you'll get the opportunity to read it but also make it more useful for further research.  You, each of you, will be making a real contribution to historical scholarship; each of you will work through a few pages of the documents, make them usable and public, and later you'll craft your own historical analysis of them.

  Instructions

  You're going to use a Transcription Tool in Sakai to do your work for this Workshop. The Tool is very easy to use. 
  
  The workshop takes place in three stages (A, B, and C).

  • Task A is to transcribe six pages of text from one of our 18th-century sources. You won’t have to choose anything; the tool will assign the pages to you.
  • Task B is to transcribe a second set of six pages of text from our 18th-century sources. (These six pages will already have been transcribed by someone else in Task A. The six pages you transcribed in Task A will be assigned to someone else in Task B.)
  • Task C is to look at the work of two of your classmates. Working with a third six-page section, you will compare and correct the transcriptions of two of your classmates (their work in Tasks A and B) so that we might produce a clean and correct transcription. (Again, the Tool will assign these pages to you.)

  You must complete your A and B transcriptions by the end of the day on October 23rd. The comparative transcription (C) is due by the end of the day on October 30th.  You may start as soon as you have finished reading the instructions. Note that you may have to be patient in completing Task C, since it requires that enough students have completed Tasks A and B. Therefore, you will help yourself and everyone else in the class if you complete Tasks A and B as soon as you can.

  Tasks A and B of the Workshop are very straight-forward: go to the Transcription Tool in Sakai. You can find it by using the link, or by going to the Tools menu in Sakai. There you'll see three buttons.  Click the first button (A) and that will take you to a screen with two windows. One is an image of a single page from original 18th-century book (which the tool will assign to you - you won't have to choose anything - it will simply be there); the other is the window in which you'll type the clean, transcribed, digital version.

  You will transcribe the text one page at a time.

  • At the end of each page, choose "Next" at the top to move to the next page, and so on until you have finished the six pages (you can also choose "Previous" if you wish to go back to review your work).
  • To save your current work, press "Save".
  • You can go back to the Overview page by pressing "Back" (but don't forget to save changes!).
  • When your six pages are done, and you're satisfied with the result, press "Save and Mark as Done" to submit your transcript for review. You will no longer be able to make edits after pressing this button!
  • You can then move on to the second window (B) where you'll transcribe six more pages [i.e. six new pages that the tool will choose for you].
  • You can then begin C (instructions below). And in the end, the program then reassembles the pamphlet with its fresh new clean text!

  To be clear, at no point will you have to choose a text. When you go to the Transcription Tool, the tool assigns a six-page section to you at each stage (A, B, and C).
  
  The three books you'll work together to transcribe are:

  • Anon. (i.e., an unknown or anonymous author), Remarks on a Pamphlet, written by the Rev. James Ramsay (London, 1784).
  • Beilby Porteus, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1784).
  • James Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (Dublin, 1784).

  Some details on entering your transcription

  • You need to enter the text one line at a time - not one sentence at a time, one line at a time. Thus you need to hit "Enter" [Return] at the end of each line in the original text.
  • ​Enter all headers and footers (for example, titles, page numbers, footnotes, etc.) and give them their own lines.
  • Enter exactly what you see.  If it's spelled what looks to be incorrectly, type it that way.
  • If it's all caps, type it all CAPS. If there's hyphenation, include the hyphen-ation. You might also see semi-colons [;] printed with spaces before and after ; type it that way.
  • But be careful.  All those "thiftles" are "thistles". So change them, since the author is actually using a long s, not an f! But you might find, for example, "chearful" - that's what we would write as "cheerful".  Type it as "chearful", since this is the spelling the author used. And you might find words with what look to us like random capital letter: "It was to my Taste". Type it with the Caps.
  • If you don't see an example here, use your best judgement.  That's where the comparison (C) may help us.

  Task C

  The process in Task C is effectively the same as in Tasks A and B. When you open C you'll see an image of a piece of 18th-century text and a blank page, just as you did when you transcribed A and B. Above that will be two windows with transcribed text; one labelled A and one labelled B. Those are an A and B transcription completed by two of your classmates (someone else will be looking at your A and B transcriptions).

  Your task in C is to transcribe from the original, just as you did in earlier tasks, but also to use your classmates' versions as guides.  The transcription tool software compares the two texts for you to help you notice differences between the two.  Your job is to examine the text, examine the two transcriptions, and type the corrected (final) version. You'll type that into the blank window, just as you did when you did A and B.

  ​The colours in the previously transcribed versions help you to identify similarities/differences: 

  • If the text background is white, then the two versions agree;
  • if the text background is yellow, that means there is some difference in formatting (punctuation, spacing, returns, etc). 
  • if text background is red (A) or green (B) that means there is some difference in content (words added or omitted, different spellings, etc).
  • The grey areas between lines of text are for appearances only (they separate between the colours).  They do not ​ represent spaces or line breaks entered by your peers; only lines that start with a number represent actual text entered by your peers.

  The idea is that two people have transcribed, and a third is checking. The end result should be good, clean text - text that we can begin to use with our digital tools.

  Now, start reading and transcribing!

  Slowly.

• 1 media/Bayle Dictionary 1710 BrockSpecColl Dark.jpg 2024-08-28T16:36:00+00:00 How to Read Early Modern Texts: Component Parts and Transcriptions 19 2024/25 image_header 2024-09-19T18:05:14+00:00

  This Week's Big Questions

  How do we decipher, transcribe, and make sense of  Early Modern printed texts?
  How has the digitization of primary source material changed the way historians work? 

  This Week's Big Challenge

  This week we begin to practice some of the less celebrated, but ultimately very rewarding skills that historians possess.  We are are learning to SLOW DOWN, explore the organizational structure of early modern texts, learn how to read them, and transcribe them. What does that mean? 

  To "transcribe" means to reproduce someone else's writing in modern form.

  Learning Outcomes

  • Be able to transcribea single page from an early modern text, so that you will feel confident reading other early modern books in the weeks to come.
  • Learn how to pre-read an early modern text by examining the title page, and introductory sections
  • Analyze the contents of an early modern text so that you practice the skills of close reading, contextualization, corroboration, and sourcing.
  • Practice assessing the line between errors, omissions, and style in early modern texts.
  • Explore questions surrounding digital access to primary sources, and the problem of digital privilege.

  Background

  We are all familiar with online influencers, TikTok celebrities, and infomercials, but how write something here about reading quickly...
  
  Our primary material this week involves a small section of a text by an early English explorer, Richard Whitborne . The title of the text that you will read is A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (it is part of a larger book -- and that book is the subject of your first assignment). In these pages Whitborne writes about his observations in the newly acquired English colony of Newfoundland. It is important that you read the version text provided by links on this page and not others, because one of the most important learning outcomes for this week is that you should learn how to read early modern books in the format that they were printed in originally. As the course progresses, we will be providing you with lots of sources that are only available in this form, so if you do not learn the basic skills of reading these texts now, you will be at a real disadvantage later in the course!
   

  Reading a Frontispiece or Title Page

  What can we learn about a book by reading its title page?
  
  When reading Early Modern Texts, the frontispiece or title page provided readers with significant information about the book's content.  Let's take a look at the Title page for John Stedman's Narrative of Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.
  
  How do the visual elements at the beginning of this book catch the readers’ attention, shape their interpretation of the text, and perhaps make literary connections? Describe what you see on the title page. Are there hints in the title and subtitles that suggest the topics this book will outline? Are there any images on the title page? If so, do they provide any further useful information about the book's contents? Who is the publisher? When was it published? Does knowing the date and location of publication help you to establish historical context for the book? Does the title page contain any literary or biblical references? If so, how might that help us to understand author's point of view regarding the book's content? If we look at the table of contents, what does it suggest about the sequence of events, or topics discussed in the book?
  
  You will notice that there is indeed a poem quoted on the title page. Who is the poet? What is the poem? Can you read it? Try typing the poem into Google Translate. Does that help you to understand its meaning?  You will be encountering other texts and images in languages other than English. While we do not expect any of you to be proficient in multiple languages, experimenting with the online tools available to you in order to help you better understand documents is often very helpful!
  
  
  

  But, wait, you may ask, what about transcribing the text, and does transcribing even matter??

  
  In many cases, when you visit an archive, photography may not be permitted!! This is rapidly changing, but not universally. So, how do you remember what you read in the archives? You transcribe it. This ensures you have an accurate record for future use. One of my first archival adventures as an undergraduate led me to the private archives of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, where I was ushered into a tiny, unheated room in the basement, the muniment room, which was piled with documents and papers. My visit required arranging several weeks ahead of time, and I was granted access to the room for only a few hours.  Cameras were not permitted in the room, but I needed to glean as much information from what I could read in as short a time as possible. Note-taking skills were definitely important then, but in order to have useful tidbits of information to bring my research alive, transcribing the letters I found was critical to advancing my research!  While a strict adherence to the no camera rule is no longer thanks to the advent of digital photography, it does remain very prevalent. So, what do you with box full of historical treasures in the archives?  You transcribe them, so that you can refer back to them when you write up your research!
  
  But, this is not the only reason historians transcribe documents. Increasingly, historians are engaging with digital tools to help them approach documents in new ways. Many of these tools use OCR (optical character recognition) software to identify key words and phrases. This software was designed to read contemporary text, however, which means that many of the documents that historians encounter remain either illegible, or mistranslated by these tools. 

  A Practical (and Humorous) Introduction to Reading Early Modern Books

  Take a look at this  excerpt with the help of Devon Eastland's helpful introduction to reading older English books. (It's in your toolbox for this week). The title of Eastland's essay is "Why do old books use F's instead of S's?" Eastland's answer is that they don't. The confusion is a mistake on the inexperienced reader's part.
  
  If you’re not familiar with older fonts, you might wonder why everyone spoke with a "lifp". They didn’t.  Some of the older versions of the letter "s" look more like what we would call an "f". Look closely. Can you see that that there is a horizontal bar that goes all the way through both sides of the "f", but if there's any horizontal bar on an old-fashioned "s" it's only to the left-hand side of the letter. In other words, the two letters are NOT the same. This (to us) strange version of "s" is called a "long s". It is NOT an "f".
  
  So, why do we care? As historians increasingly employ digital tools to read texts, they have discovered that the "long s" is a BIG problem for OCR  computer programs. You will be introduced to one of these programs in our later assignments, Voyant Tools.  By contrast, our minds are pliable enough to learn these very subtle distinctions, largely because we can usually figure out what these words should be (our minds do a kind of auto-correction, anticipating what should come next, how the words should look). While there are new versions of OCR programs emerging -- some even that work with handwritten manuscripts (Transkribus) -- at this point it’s very difficult for a computer to read these old fonts as well as we can.
  
  When the OCR program used by archive.org, the world’s largest online archival database, tried to "read" the Whitefield passage we include above, it rendered it as this: As you can see, the computer program added a significant number of mistakes -- so many that it's really not useful for us to use this text. It’s the information age, but the machines that read this older information can’t help us here.
  
  You can do a much better job yourself. Your first step toward this goal is to recognize that we have all kinds of confusing letters and numbers that we do not confuse when we read. Look at these combinations:
  • 1 vs l (the number vs the letter);
  • 0 vs O (again, the number [zero] vs the letter [capital o]);
  • rn vs m (two letters [r and n] vs one letter, a distinction that some OCR computer programs find difficult to make).
  
  When you read early modern books in English (and in many other languages that use a Latin alphabet, too), the letters that readers often mix up (but you should not) are:
  • f and s;
  • u and v;
  • i and j.
  
  The biggest confusions come with f's and s's. Remember that fonts have histories. They have changed over the generations, sometimes significantly. Don't let these changes give you a "fhit sit!" These two non-words in quotation marks would be an incorrect way of reading and transcribing an imaginary text. We won't correct the mistake, but you should not make this kind of mistake in your reading of early modern texts! Don't panic! Read the words that are actually on the page. Don't let the older fonts confuse you. You should not change the spelling that the original writers used (even if that spelling is not correct by modern standards), but you should also not introduce mistakes that the original writers never meant to make!
  
  Let's practice with that 1745 passage from George Whitefield. Read it slowly, word-by-word, and correct the mistakes that the computer made.  The corrected version and proper transcription of the passage from 1745 is:

  YOUR last sweet Letter was very savoury
  to my Taste. It brought God to my
  Soul. I feel much Heart-Union with
  you. I thank you for all the kind Expressions
  of your increasing Love. May the Lord re-
  ward you an Hundred-fold in this World, and in
  that to come! Oh what a blessed Instrument of
  much Good, has the Lord made you to my
  poor Soul!

  This kind of work is a great exercise for the historian-in-training.  It requires you to slow down and read carefully.  Yes, this passage is strange, but making sense of this strangeness is the kind of challenge that historians try to grapple with.  We know that confronting this challenge takes time and is not easy. We sympathize: Most of you have full schedules, with jobs, domestic responsibilities, and university courses.  You’re always needing to be in a hurry, to read quickly -- you just need to get through as much of the material as possible. We professors do that, too; sometimes we even recommend "strategic reading" as an effective way to cut through the detail to get at the essentials.  But in research we often need to slow down, to read carefully, to think about what we’re reading, to sometimes stop on a word or a phrase to ponder exactly what’s going on. 

  Learning Activities
   

  This lesson is VERY "hands on", so plan your time carefully, and start EARLY!!!

  First Post and response (Monday or Tuesday):
  • Take a look at the following selection from Richard Whitborne's Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land.
    • Read the title page carefully, and scan the headings of each section.
    • What can we learn about the text before we even start reading it?
  • Consider the way the text is constructed.
    • How does this help us to anticipate what the text may contain?
    • What is  an Epistle Dedicatory?
    • Who does Whitborne mean by His Majesties Good Subjects?
    • What can we learn from a Preface? or a Conclusion? Why the additional sections like Letters and Charges?
    • After thinking through all these questions, you are ready to write explore one of these questions in your post describing what you think this book is about, and why, just from the title page, or how these other parts of the text relate to it as a whole. Understanding how early modern authors approach their audiences will help you to weed away much of the flowery language you will encounter this year!
  Second Post and response (Tuesday-Thursday):
  
  Now it is time to actually read those sections, and transcribe a small section of the text.
  • For your second forum post transcribe 1-2 pages of Richard Whitborne's A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land
    • I have divided the selections by your name in the alphabet, so that we can explore more selections from the text, so pay attention to which section you are being asked to read.
    • Read through the section, and choose a page that sounds interesting to you. Transcribe it! 
    • Once you have your transcription, briefly describe the passage ( include the page numbers, some information about what's going on in the text and how it relates to the topic of the chapter
    • Avoid transcribing a page that other students have already transcribed. This means you will need to be checking the forums to see what others have already contributed before you begin!
  • Then in your first response Connect or compare your passage with at least one other passage that others in your group have added to the forum discussion. Read the transcriptions that other students have posted to your forum discussion, and check several of them against the original text by Whitborne. If you find mistakes in the transcriptions that others have posted, suggest corrections, kindly.
    • The purpose of this exercise is for you and your forum colleagues to help one another improve your reading ability, so please provide corrections in a positive and encouraging way, and ask questions of each other if you're not sure how to transcribe a passage.
    • Finally, comment on one another's experiences. What worked? What did you struggle with? What might you like to explore given more time?
    • Feel free to comment on posts that have transcribed different sections of the text. The point here, is to explore its various component parts, and how they work together!
  Final Reflective Post (Thursday or Friday):
  • Finally, in a third post, reflect on Sharon Block's discussion of digital privilege. Consider your exercise this week as a virtual archival experience. This is not a text that you might readily find in your local library, and the copy you are reading comes from the special collections at Memorial University in St. John's, NFLD. Reflect on some of the ways that technology and computers facilitate what historians can do with their research. What do you see as some of the limits of digitization? Use your experience this week to describe yourself as a digital historian!
  So yes, you read that correctly...you will be required to post at least THREE times in this lesson, so plan your time wisely! Feel free to combine steps one and two in a single post. What is most important is that you take the time to think, not only about the words you are reading, but how the text itself is structured to help you understand is purpose, audience, and potential contents.

  Toolbox

  For an introduction to transcribing Early Modern Texts, visit:
  • Devon Eastland, "Why Do Old Books Use F's instead of S's?" Swann Auction Galleries (April 2020) (https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/early-printed-books/2020/04/why-do-old-books-use-fs-instead-of-ss/);
    
     

  Primary Source

  • Selections from:
    • Richard Whitmore, A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (1620)
    • This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from A-F
    • This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from G-Q
    • This is your selection if your last name begins with letters from R-Z
    • For an additional challenge, try this selection

  Secondary Source

  • Our secondary source this week explores the way that digitizing materials has changed the way historians do history.
    •  Sharon Block. “How to Research History Online” Doing History. Episode 8.

  Learning to read slooooooowly, and carefully, and thoughtfully are what we are practising often in this course, and certainly this week, too.

  
  
  Supplemental Materials

  
  Many of you may not have been introduced to cursive writing, so I am offering a supplementary section here that you can revisit and explore.
  The Library from the University of Hull, UK provides samples of several styles of Early Modern handwriting, and most of what we will encounter in this course is likely a form of later italic with some remnants of secretary hand.
   

  What happens if you encounter a source in cursive writing?

  
  Here are some useful websites to help you read Early Modern handwriting. Use them to help you read through sources you encounter in cursive writing. There are a few in the course! They are not intended to be mini-courses for you, rather resources to help you when you get stuck.  Choose the one that helps you the best, they are all good!
  • Palaeography at The National Archives UK
  • English Handwriting Online 1500-1700 at Cambridge University
  • Quarantine Reading:Learning to Read Secretary Hand by Kathryn James at the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University