Transcribing Teamwork

By Kailan Sindelar
Graduate Student, UNC Charlotte

It’s a rule of mine that I travel with as little technology as I think is appropriate. It’s a rule that has kept me from being distracted by day-to-day electronic procrastinations and responsibilities when I am in a new, exciting place. Without thinking twice, I left my laptop at home and headed out to Washington DC with my fellow grad students from UNC Charlotte. It wasn’t until we were somewhere in Virginia that I realized I might actually need my own laptop for the Transcribathon. Having never been to the Folger Shakespeare Library before, I had pictured a library much our own campus (which offers a large number of laptops for rent). Since this was not the case when I arrived to the Transcribathon, Robin Kello was kind enough to let me transcribe with him. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I became quite the handicap when we started doing Sprint competitions. Poor Robin was considerate enough to let me confirm his transcriptions before committing them to the keyboard. While we certainly weren’t the fastest transcribers as a team, we did make a good team.

As we went through transcribing together, during a sprint or not, we collaborated on every word. We took extra care to confirm or question each other’s initial interpretations of the handwriting. We also shared surprise at recipes that took a turn for the unexpected. Sheapshead Puddin was our favorite. It’s a recipe that sounds so colloquial, yet obviously from a foreign time. The kind of collaboration and mutual enjoyment from encountering the unexpected is exactly the kind of experience we strive for in our meetings in the Early Modern Paleography Society, which is a transcription club we have created on campus. While our mutual collaboration may not be fast, it allows us to compare impressions and learn how our peers interpret the same handwriting that we see. Transcribing in group allows us to learn with each other and share our reactions to what we transcribe. Watching, and being a part of, the mass collaboration that took place at the Transcribathon was inspiring. Our group walked away happy and encouraged by the amount of work that can be accomplished when so many people collaborate.



Cite this blog post
jennifermunroe (2015, December 15). Transcribing Teamwork. emroc. Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.58079/o89a

About jennifermunroe

Jennifer Munroe is Associate Professor of English at UNC Charlotte and author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate, 2008) and editor of Making Gardens of Their Own: Gardening Manuals for Women, 1500-1750 (Ashgate, 2007). Most recently, she co-edited (with Rebecca Laroche) Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (Palgrave, 2011). Munroe is currently working on a monograph, an ecofeminist literary history of science about the relationship between women, nature, and writing in the context of seventeenth-century scientific discourse. For fun, she gardens, hikes, and takes her dogs to run on land she and her husband own outside of town.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.