Poets & Lovers Results

Transcriptions

All data from the project has been saved by the team at The Diaries of Michael Field and all four volumes transcribed by volunteers are being readied for publication. This is a time-consuming process that includes:

• reformatting all page data to create a unified document,
• adding additional encoding to it for misspellings, undecipherable words, and new formatting for verse and quoted letters,
• proofreading each volume against the hand-written original.
• correcting the transcription
• converting the document to the TEI-XML (Text Encoding Initiative) format, for archival storage and subsequent transformation to HTML for publication format, and finally
• ingestion of the transcription by the Diary web-server where it is made publicly available.

The quality of the transcriptions has proven to be remarkably high, and all four editions are completely suitable for eventual publication, so congratulations to everyone who contributed to the project. Well done!

Website update

The Diaries website is in the process of a complete rebuild, and no new volumes can be published until its completion. While we are sorry for the delay, the results will be worth it, so please be patient. We will notify participants when each volume is available to view on the website.

Conference presentation for scholarly editors

Two of our team members, Carolyn Dever and Peter Logan, presented a talk about the Zooniverse transcriptions at the 2023 annual conference of the Association for Documentary Editing. This is a professional organization of scholarly editors who were interested in the prospect of using volunteer transcribers for their own editing projects. We described the process of creating a Zooniverse transcription site, working with volunteers, and processing the completed transcriptions to make them usable for scholarly editions. Audience questions indicated enthusiasm for this new method of transcription and its incorporation into workflows for scholarly editions.