transcription question | Hell’s Printing Press

Working with Vertical Text

13 April 2016

It wasn’t until I began looking through all the letters in the Blake Archive that I realized just how unique Blake’s second November 22^nd 1802 letter to Thomas Butts really is. This uniqueness poses some interesting problems when it comes to encoding. The text of this letter fills both leaves of paper from top to bottom and comes very close to the margins. It includes both prose and verse, and the verse is in two columns that begin on the first page and end on the second.

BAND, Digital Humanities

Blake In Photoshop, Part 2.5: Can You Read This?

29 October 2015

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a simple Photoshop technique for recovering faded text in old manuscripts. I used a couple of objects from Four Zoas as a demo because we’ve been working a lot with Four Zoas and, well, it’s pretty hard to read.

It wasn’t a true experiment, though. Because FZ has been so heavily scrutinized by scholars past and present, nearly every conceivable reading is documented and available for verification. In other words, I was working towards a recovery that I already had in mind. Not-so-boldly-going where many have gone before.

OK, so maybe that’s fine for proof-of-concept. But what about a real test? Could we try this out on something we really had trouble reading? Wouldn’t you know it—a recent letter acquisition provided exactly that opportunity.

XML

By the Book: Catching Up with the XML Tag Set

6 August 2014

This is not a call for reform. This is not an admission of guilt.

Moving deeper into Blake’s typographic works for the Archive has presented a number of new encoding questions, particularly with how to handle potentially “secondary” text on the page, like printer’s marks, catchwords, page numbers, titles, etc.

BAND

A Transcription Puzzle: “then She bore Pale desire”, Part 3

11 June 2014

In my last post, we were left wondering what the “P&S.” or “E&S.” written at the bottom of one of the “Pale desire” manuscript pages could mean. (If you haven’t been keeping up, you can find the first and second installments of our saga here and here.) Well, Sandy and I both took a stab at it.

BAND

A Transcription Puzzle: “then She bore Pale desire”, Part 2

21 May 2014

The other week, I posted an entry concerning my transcription of a set of manuscript pages beginning “then She bore Pale desire”. At the bottom of one of the pages, what seems to be an abbreviation is written in pencil marks that have either faded over time or were initially written with a series of light strokes. Here’s the image again:

BAND

A Transcription Puzzle: “then She bore Pale desire”, Part 1

8 May 2014

I am currently in the process of transcribing some of Blake’s manuscript material beginning “then She bore Pale desire” and have run into some difficulty. At the bottom of object 5, Blake adds additional text in a rough hand using pencil. (The majority of the object is covered in brown ink.) I can read the text at the bottom right (which is an addition, the placement of which is indicated by a line). However, there is also what appears to be an abbreviation at the bottom left. I cannot make it out with certainty, and it is not connected to the rest of the text (in any obvious way, at least).