The Powell Diary Takes on Oxygen

After transcribing our Powell Diary pages, we then went through and color-coded specific meaningful words in order to then easily markup our transcriptions in the program Oxygen. Before we as a class were able to transfer our marked up transcriptions into Oxygen however, we had to create a Google doc where decisions could be made regarding certain words and how they would be presented in the final document. While transcribing the symbols and words throughout the manuscript pages, students came across many words that were misspelled or inconsistent, so as a group the class was forced to decide how we wanted to write these names in our transcriptions.

In our TEI files, we marked up names, places, objects, time of day, events, states, and traits, however when deciphering between states and traits, we as a class had difficulties choosing which word fell under what category.  Informed, collective choices were necessary to be made in order agree on what needed to be included in our transcriptions or what did not need to be. Pierazzo stated in her article that, “scholarly choices constitute the base of any transcription and subsequent diplomatic edition. But that then raises the question how to cho

ose.” Choosing how we as a class wanted to write certain words became the most important factor in being able to progress and mark up our pages on Oxygen. This shared document we used to determine how words and symbols were to be presented served as a means of unifying each classmates transcription so that all words and symbols were written the same way throughout the entire diary. Once we were able to agree on how we wanted each word and marking written in Oxygen, altering our sections became easy. Pierzzo also makes a claim that different types of manuscripts must be treated different, as certain forms of writing in print may display a picture or present a certain meaningful shape. If this is the case, editors must decide whether to include these certain formats, or to exclude this graphical information all together. Although it can be argued that digital editions can represent many more details or “features” than a print publication, Pierzzo states that the web possesses some limitations, including for example, reproducing “calligrammes.” This type of manuscript is difficult to reproduce on the web, as the original document is arranged in a specific graphical way. All in all, diplomatic editions recorded as an XML file serve as an informative and easily accessible source in which one can break apart and further understand transcribed documents.