By Rebecca Laroche

Ninety-three transcribers! 208 pages triple-keyed! Tweets and stewed pigeons, chocolate and perfume, what a marvelous transcribathon we had!  So what’s next?

First, comes collation and vetting, as well as an answer to a question that has probably been burning for many of you: “Why so many keyings?” Having three keyings expedites and boosts the vetting process. With three keyings not only can vetters highlight areas that are in disagreement, they can also predict what is likely to be the correct resolution of that dispute.

As the transcription software EMROC is using, Dromio, is still in its beta stages, the vetting mechanism remains a work in progress, but as this mechanism is close to completion, we hope to turn soon to this editing stage.

At the same time collators determine the best possible transcription, they will be adding XML tags within the transcribed text. Those of you who were part of the transcribathon already contributed many of these every time you noted a thorn, a tilde, a place, or a name, etc., but in the time leading up to the transcribathon, members of the steering committee met with the Folger’s Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) team about formulating additional tags specific to recipe books.

The list we came up with is the following: diseases (plague, sore throat, etc.), ingredients (rosemary, man’s skull, etc.), processes (boil, distill, dry, etc.), seasonal time (Michaelmas, May, harvest, etc.), quantities (handful, dram, penny’s worth, etc), and efficacy statements (probatum est, saved a life, etc.). As EMROC collators edit the texts, they will insert these recipe-specific tags, allowing us to search within these categories as the database grows.

Finally, as EMROC’s collection grows to include more manuscripts, we want to provide a rich context for understanding its contents. Currently, Elaine Leong is researching and

writing a general contextual essay for the Winche project, which includes general biographical and bibliographical information as well as the groups that have worked on transcription, and we try to do this for each manuscript introduced into the EMROC queue. Subsequent to this general contextual essay, moreover, posts around each project will appear in EMROC’s blog. The vision is something along the lines of the thematic series in the Recipes Project Hillary Nunn and I have been writing around the College of Physicians manuscript (http://recipes.hypotheses.org/thematic-series/exploring-manuscript-10a214). The writing of these posts does not have to be limited to one or two authors, however. Right now, graduate students at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the University of Texas, Arlington are working on entries on Winche that will situate individual recipes and illuminate historical details within a larger context. Our hope is that as these posts are entered onto EMROC’s webpage and tagged, they will provide a context for understanding not only the unique manuscript but also the larger recipe database.

So what’s next? The sustained work of the collective. Yes, there are other manuscripts waiting in the wings to be transcribed. As this post hopes to reveal, however, the collective is not just dedicated to transcribing seventeenth-century manuscripts, as much fun as it can be. In creating an “accessible and searchable corpus of recipe books currently in manuscript,” EMROC hopes to create layers of connectivity: among the recipe collections and among the collective’s members. So thank you to all who participated in the transcribathon October 7. You all made it a truly thrilling event. Whether or not you participated in the transcribathon, if you have interest in participating in EMROC’s ongoing efforts, be it in individual or group transcription, vetting and tagging, or contextualization, do send a note to contactemroc@gmail.com.