Ladies and gentlemen, I encoded something!  This something, in fact: http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/index.php?title=JB/116/650/039&oldid=60018

Before I began this assignment, I anticipated that “encoding” would be an activity of saddening difficulty, but the actual process was not at all what I thought it would be.  The word “code” conjured up mental images of those mysterious black boxes (the kind that People Who Know What They Are Doing are wont to use) that contain endless tumbling cataracts of magical white text that could, most probably, break the world if improperly fiddled with.  However, the Transcribe Bentham project’s toolbar was very easy to use and I appreciated the beginners-welcome tone of the introductory materials.  The following sentence (from the Transcription Guidelines page) is quite possibly the most comforting thing I have encountered since embarking on Mission Digital Humanities:  “Some of this may seem daunting, but do not be afraid of having a go at transcription – it is impossible to break anything, and any errors you might make can easily be reverted.”

I love looking at old handwriting, but I think I’m on the same page as Dan when it comes to deciphering what it actually says.  I opted to start with a printed page so I could focus on the encoding.  After that went as well as it did, I turned to a handwritten page.  I decided to set that aside for now because I was having difficulty increasing the zoom to a comfortable level on the screen of my relatively small laptop.  I plan to continue working on it, but I intend to do it from the large screen of a Mac in the library.  Because my interests lie in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, I was delighted to find that Transcribe Bentham offers links to paleography resources.  I was not expecting to stumble into paleography as a result of DH homework!  This has been my favorite assignment so far!

Transcribe Bentham was not my first experience with either the transcription process or XML. In Neil Friastaist’s Technoromanticism course, half of us were given pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript to encode and engage with as we tried to sort through her handwriting, Percy Shelley’s handwriting, her curious doodling habits, and the actual textual revisions that Frankenstein underwent during its composition. The easy part of that particular project, however, was that we already had a transcription to work from when we did our own encoding. Transcribe Bentham placed more responsibility on me to play a part in the deciphering, not simply the encoding or double-checking, of a manuscript. So while the XML encoding was not new to me, the transcription process of reading and attempting to accurately represent what Bentham was writing (sloppily) was up to me almost entirely.

My passage of choice was the beginning of a section titled Composition, where Bentham writes on what he believe the duties of the Courts over their procedures. In several cases, context was key to correctly transcribing a word (no shock there), and so was returning after some time away in order to reread and discover whether or not I had any more ideas about what a particular piece of writing was saying. But of more interest to me, was when I found a word that I could not easily discard what I thought I was reading, despite it not making sense. To clarify, this is the image I refer to:

What does that look like to you? To me, it looks like ‘websites’ and that is how I initially read it until a nanosecond later when I realized they didn’t have websites in the 18th and 19th centuries. But this realization started me thinking about time and culture and how that can affect an interpretive process like transcription. While my example is extreme, and was quickly realized and dismissed as impossible, more subtle examples like this could occur with anachronisms and especially slang, idioms, and euphemisms. This is something that affects the transcription process I’m sure, and would be interested in seeing (if I can given my limited knowledge about Jeremy Bentham) whether or not this sort of thing has occurred and is much more difficult to pick up on because of our distance from the time period and (my personal) lack of colloquial knowledge from Bentham’s era.

When I first glanced at the exercise for today, I wasn’t sure exactly what transcribing would entail. The tutorial videos were very informative, and the first video made the process seem relatively easy. But when I watched the second video, I thought, “I have to ENCODE this, too?” Typing words is easy. Encoding, to me, has always seemed like writing in an entirely new language.

However, I am very into toolbars. (I mean that). As such, I thought the encoding process of transcribing Bentham was totally doable, even on my first try! I typed the line breaks since they were so numerous, and made one typo ( <lb> instead of <lb/> ) at one point, but I caught myself when I viewed the preview. Other than that, the toolbar was incredibly easy to navigate, especially because I had a very simple page sequence with very few “additions,” no “strikethroughs,” and NO unusual spellings, illegible words or questionable words on my end!

Seriously, I have seen some of the words my classmates are dealing with and I’m not sure how I ended up with JB/002/312/001, which appears to have the most pristine cursive handwriting I’ve ever seen. I went to the “un-transcribed” links and this was the first folio I tried! But enough gloating about my beginner’s luck. I enjoyed the encoding experience, not because it forced me to try something I thought would leave me befuddled (and it didn’t) but because it forced (literal) close reading. Zoomed in, read-each-word close reading. With such diligent attention to words (and punctuation! oh, the punctuation) one can’t help but consider the choices the writer made as he or she composed the text. I’d imagine that transcribing and encoding poetry is especially illuminating in this way, as each line break and em-dash is noted in code. None of these are particularly new or astute observations, but it was, of course, fruitful to experience them first hand.

Happy snowquester, everyone!

As my classmates, I found it very hard to read the manuscript. I also had the feeling it was not going to be that hard: as a teacher I am very used to the most bizarre handwritings, but this was a puzzle for me. Second, as not being native English, it was more difficult to guess! Sometimes I did not know if the phrase or word I was reading belonged to the time Bentham wrote or it was more modern. The same with old words that I never heard of before. I searched on dictionaries, texts by Benham, I opened other folios. I do not know if I am the right person to work with an archive in a language other than the ones I know well! But sometimes it could be productive, as a foreign view is always interesting and helpful.

There were moments that I did not understand what I was transcribing as a text: I had just words with a minimum of cohesion and coherence. I had a feeling of complete fragmentation! I think that the exercise was good to see how fragmented digital texts are, how we face fragmentation everywhere working in DH. We were working with just a tiny part of the gigantic Bentham’s work, and in my case, knowing just what Foucault said about panopticons and nothing else. The good is that now I know a lot more about Bentham, his life and his work.

I must admit that I liked it a lot transcribing and encoding. When I began transcribing I found the tool bar very easy to use! But it was not so easy for me to find a folio to transcribe, I selected this one using the random option and it turned out to be easy level. But I had problems to read three little words, even though I spent many days trying to figure them out.
I received an answer, and it was accepted! I was surprised to know that the transcript was right! I just missed a few words (mainly because of the crossing outs), but the rest was ok. I received a text saying that it was “far from the easiest manuscript to transcribe, so this is a great effort!”

I found it very interesting having been part of a project that thinks of the importance of preservation (and I agree with Mary’s words), and in which many people are involved (volunteer transcribers, historians, editors, digital humanists, etc.) I liked the idea I was helping to the project, creating something new, doing, building.

When I first read this assignment, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake for me.  As a TV production assistant–and beyond–I was required to transcribe taped interviews on an almost daily basis.  But trying to decipher Jeremy Bentham’s handwriting is not even remotely close to rewinding a tape to pick up words during Courtney Love’s drunk ramblings.  Bentham’s handwriting has Love’s slurred speech beat, hands down.

After many of the same issues Mary discussed in her post–namely Firefox not being Transcribe Bentham-friendly–I finally was able to view the manuscripts available for  transcription.  After perusing a few that had not been transcribed and seeing the writing was nearly illegible, I opted for an “easy” manuscript.  Of course most of these had already been done, so it was back to the untranscribed category and clicking at random to find one that might possibly fall into the “easy” category if I was lucky.  I chose JB/002/010/001 because it looked user-friendly.  I was wrong.

It seems every other word got a <gap> label, resulting in numerous ellipses in the finished transcript.  Phrases such as the following left me puzzled and the document …

Overall, I think Transcribe Bentham is a great project.  Although I’m still not sure if its intent is to get people like us who think this stuff is super cool to do free work for them.  Perhaps it’s just mutually beneficial.