By Elaine Leong
Welcome to the 2015-16 academic year!
Time flies. It’s hard to believe but the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) enters its fourth year this September. Since our launch in 2012, nearly 80 students have transcribed over 900 pages across 5 campuses. In classes such as Lisa Smith’s ‘Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe’, Jennifer Munroe’s ‘Thinking Green: Eco-Approaches to Texts’, Amy Tigner’s ‘Recipes for Literature/Literature of Recipes’ and Rebecca Laroche’s ENGL 3200 course, students have worked collaboratively to transcribe the recipe books of Johanna St. John, Anne Fanshawe, Jane Baber, Frances Catchmay and Elizabeth Bulkeley. In their endeavors, they were ably aided by student research assistants working with Elaine Leong at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Hillary Nunn at The University of Akron. More information on teaching transcription in the classroom, including sample syllabi, can be found here.
The 2015-16 academic year proves to be an exciting one for EMROC. Firstly, we’re making the big move and joining forces with Heather Wolfe and the Early Modern Manuscripts Online team at the Folger Shakespeare Library. We have been working hard over the summer to prepare for our move. On the University of Colorado Colorado Springs campus, Kat Rutz and Monterey Hall, have been helping us make the transition into DROMIO by uploading images of Wellcome manuscripts and testing out the transcription interface. In early October, we will celebrate the move with an international cross-time zone transcribathon. More news on that coming soon – watch this space!
As always, the new academic year brings a new group of undergraduate and graduate student members to EMROC. This fall, nearly 70 students will be transcribing the Catchmay, Corlyon, Grenville, Bulkeley and Fanshawe recipe books on four campuses across the United States. We’re delighted to welcome Nancy Simpson-Younger and her students at Pacific Lutheran University who will be working on sections of the Corlyon manuscript as part of the course ‘The Book in Society’. Cheers to a great semester of teaching, learning and transcribing.
Finally, led by Kailan Sindelar and Breanne Weber, enterprising students on the Charlotte campus of the University of North Carolina have started the ‘Early Modern Paleography Society’. With Jennifer Munroe as their faculty advisor, EMPS members will travel to Washington D.C. to join the October transcribe-a-thon and continue to bring recipe texts to life over the coming academic year. Starting October, EMPS members will also be chronicling their adventures in transcribing on this very blog, so check-in periodically to see how they’re doing.