is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger. She loves convincing people that they can read English secretary hand and sharing quirky and unexpected collection finds and stories. — View all posts by Heather Wolfe
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Great post!
The manuscript team at the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/) also does a lot of collaborative transcription. But we don’t have such a great program for testing readings against each other and comparing differences! We end up using Google documents as a way to discuss variations in our readings of Blake’s hand because it’s easy to insert clipped images of the word, phrase, or line in question.
Rachel — October 4, 2012
A fantastic and rewarding project! Thanks, Heather, for guiding us through. Can’t wait to hear if any ideas come in on the missing words…
Miranda Garno Nesler — October 4, 2012
Re the second transcription problem, I would think it is yrh which is “your humble”
The first is surely not James. I think it may be not Sir either but servant. The tail of the supersript ‘r’ after the S extends rather than being the ‘dot’ of an ‘i’ and thus the next letter could be ‘v’ then ‘a’ with a superscript ‘t’.
Cliff Webb
Cliff Webb — October 4, 2012
That’s a possibility: so it could be “your humble Brand,” as in torch, possibly. I’ve never seen this sort of abbreviation before.
“Sir James” was lifted from the finding aid description, but I agree with you. I had flagged it because I didn’t think it looked like “James” at all! But I’m not sure if I could convince myself that there is a “v” in it, since what you describe looks like all the other spurred “a” graphs in the letter.
But now you’ve prompted me to look at it more closely, and I’m pretty sure it must be an abbreviation for “Serjeant Major” [Sriat, with a tilde above the a and t, and the i/j graph]. Now we just have to figure out which of his brothers or brothers-in-law was a serjeant major!
Heather Wolfe — October 4, 2012
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Comments
Great post!
The manuscript team at the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/) also does a lot of collaborative transcription. But we don’t have such a great program for testing readings against each other and comparing differences! We end up using Google documents as a way to discuss variations in our readings of Blake’s hand because it’s easy to insert clipped images of the word, phrase, or line in question.
Rachel — October 4, 2012
A fantastic and rewarding project! Thanks, Heather, for guiding us through. Can’t wait to hear if any ideas come in on the missing words…
Miranda Garno Nesler — October 4, 2012
Re the second transcription problem, I would think it is yrh which is “your humble”
The first is surely not James. I think it may be not Sir either but servant. The tail of the supersript ‘r’ after the S extends rather than being the ‘dot’ of an ‘i’ and thus the next letter could be ‘v’ then ‘a’ with a superscript ‘t’.
Cliff Webb
Cliff Webb — October 4, 2012
That’s a possibility: so it could be “your humble Brand,” as in torch, possibly. I’ve never seen this sort of abbreviation before.
“Sir James” was lifted from the finding aid description, but I agree with you. I had flagged it because I didn’t think it looked like “James” at all! But I’m not sure if I could convince myself that there is a “v” in it, since what you describe looks like all the other spurred “a” graphs in the letter.
But now you’ve prompted me to look at it more closely, and I’m pretty sure it must be an abbreviation for “Serjeant Major” [Sriat, with a tilde above the a and t, and the i/j graph]. Now we just have to figure out which of his brothers or brothers-in-law was a serjeant major!
Heather Wolfe — October 4, 2012