Text Transcription Issues

About Standards for Transcribing Text

• In our last meeting (18 Dec 2012) we discussed some of the challenges of transcribing text with corrections, alterations, strikeouts, ambiguous letters, etc and I briefly mentioned some transcription projects that have dealt with similar issues. A hackathon participant, Ben Brumfeld, has much more experience in this topic so first I'll point you to some information he has compiled. His blog home page (http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com) currently has a transcription of his talk about the variety of formats that various projects are using. A worthwhile read.

• If we decide to try to transcribe or preserve ambiguous or corrected/struckout characters, then the Text Encoding Initiative format might be a good start, though it would require the use of XML elements in brackets. A more lightweight approach might be to utilize some of the wiki markup formats like:
  • Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) or
  • Textile (http://txstyle.org).

• Below I've listed some projects that either establish transcription or markup standards or have published guidelines or suggestions about how to transcribe text.
  • TEI elements for representing primary documents (in particular, errors, corrections, alterations, ambiguity, etc) - http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/PH.html#PHCH
  • FreeReg, register transcription - http://www.freereg.org.uk/howto/transcribe.htm
  • Transcribe Bentham Guidelines (seems to be based on TEI) - http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Help:Transcription_Guidelines
  • New York Public Library Menu transcription guidelines - http://menus.nypl.org/help
  • National Archives Transcription tips - http://transcribe.archives.gov/tips

• Projects that might have additional approaches to transcription
  • http://scripto.org http://www.uscript.org
  • http://transcriptorium.eu http://t-pen.org