At first, the Powell Diary was not a very meaningful text to me. I felt distanced from the content and did not quite fully understand what was going on or what the significance was. However, through the process of constantly marking the text up, at first in the google doc and eventually in Oxygen, I not only became more tech savvy, but I also got to engage with each word of the text frequently, which in turn brought me closer to the content and thus closer to the background and history of the diary.
While the process was enjoyable and informative, there were undoubtedly bumps in the road in terms of transcription. The most difficult aspect of this was deciding what category each word or sentence belonged to. Of the categories (person, place, object, affiliation, date, time, event, state, trait, to name a few), affiliation, state and event were all very difficult. Affiliations were groups of people with a certain name. For instance, “traders” and “Indians” were two very popular affiliations. State could be difficult because often a person’s emotional state was not explicitly stated in the text. It could be embedded in a sentence and it could be easy to pass over as nothing. The most difficult of them all, in my opinion, was the event category. Usually consisting of several words or even a sentence or two, events were very difficult to categorize. As the transcriber, a decision had to be made: mark up every event seen, even minuscule ones, or only the important events. As Pierazzo states in her article, “Forcing Driscoll’s words a little, we might conclude that one possible and tempting answer to the question ‘where to stop’ could be ‘nowhere’, as there are potentially infinite sets of facts to be recorded” (466). In addition, in Pierazzo’s article, she explains, “…scholarly choices constitute the base of any transcription and subsequent diplomatic edition. But that then raises the question how to choose”, meaning that fundamentally, the choices involving transcription are up to the transcriber, but how to make those choices is a big piece of the puzzle.
Collaborating on this assignment was not only beneficial, I believe it was essential. In order to get the most out of something as unique as transcribing the Powell Diary, it seemed necessary for our class to use each other as resources. It allowed for us to bounce questions and ideas off of each other and further aid the process.