All posts by lisasmith

About lisasmith

Lecturer in Digital History, University of Essex. Writes on gender, health, and the household in early modern England and France (ca. 1600-1800). Primary investigator for the Sir Hans Sloane Correspondence Online Project. Collaborator for the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, founding co-editor of The Recipes Project, and blogger at Wonders and Marvels and Shakespeare's World. Tweets as @historybeagle. On Zooniverse as @LWSmith.

Getting Ready for the Transcribathon!

Early Modern Recipes, Events, Posts, transcribathon, Transcribing

It’s nearly #EMROCtranscribes day! I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to the introduction to Mary Hawker’s book and our wonderful speakers (Rachel Rich, Edith Snook and Tim Underhill), who bring some fascinating insights into working with recipes and recipe books. (Links to the recorded talks and registration for the speaker Q&A can be found in our previous post.)

In case you missed it, we also have a page that outlines how you can prepare for the transcribathon — such as setting up a FromThePage account or finding the sign-up for each page. The actual texts won’t open for transcription, however, until we kick things off at 11:00 GMT/7:00 EST on 4 November. The countdown is beginning…

One other thing that you could do, if you were so inclined, is to answer a little survey (no more than five minutes) so we can get a sense of our community members and your interests — it helps us to understand what you’re looking for in our transcribathons. Thank you!

We can’t wait to talk transcribing with you on Friday!

Thank you!

Posts

Another transcribathon comes to an end… Thank you to everyone who participated. And thank you to the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Royal College of Physicians Museum, and the Wellcome Collection who partnered with us for this event. 

We had lots of fun and hope you did, too.

Although the Zoom room is now closed and we’ve left Twitter for the night, we could see lots of people still transcribing. That’s amazing! If you are still going, then you’ll find that Fanshawe has space still–and it’s a joy of a manuscript.

You’re all wonderful!

Questions arising…

Posts

Mac Issues with Google Docs

A few people have indicated problems using Google Docs from their Macs. Safari and Google Docs often don’t work well together, so changing the Browser to Chrome may help. You might also log into your Google account to see if that helps. If staying in Safari, pulling it to the side of the window and making it bigger might help. Do let us know if you are still having trouble!

Finding Lady Ayscough Pages

Be sure to use Google Docs to enter FromthePage with this manuscript in particular. If you click on the page number, it will take you right to the page. We are aware that on FromthePage, the pages look to be just hyphens on the left hand side. But if you look to the upper right hand side, you can see the page number listed there. e.g.  ‘Page 32 of 134’.

Codes

Kim Connor asks: ‘I’m trying to expand a ‘ye’ but when I use the button to tag it I get <expan abbr=””>th</expan>e. The abbr=”” bit isn’t in the example page. Do I just leave it?’

The consensus, as @RCPMuseum just confirmed is: ‘just ignore the additional abbr=”” in the tag. It’s used by some other projects, but not for this one. You can leave it where it is or delete it out. Probably easier just to leave it and skip past.”

There are hot keys to mark unclear text, insertions, and such at the top of the transcribing box. But if you want to work with more codes, please see our FAQ — both the Folgerpedia and Liza Blake’s cheat sheet offer some easy tips!