On May 18th & 19th, 2017, EMMO held the Early Modern Manuscripts Online: New Directions in Teaching and Research conference at the Folger, in collaboration with the Folger Institute. This conference was a culmination of the project’s initial three-year phase, funded by a generous grant from IMLS.
The conference began with welcoming remarks followed by a roundtable progress report on the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project to date.… Continue Reading
Posts By: Paul Dingman
As one reader guessed, the phrase shown in last week’s Crocodile mystery image is in secretary hand, i.e., a type of handwritten script widely used in the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As transcribed in Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) from the upper right corner of a manuscript certificate, the phrase is “Est horse lee.”… Continue Reading
To kick off the new year at Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), the EMMO team (Paul Dingman, Mike Poston, Sarah Powell, Caitlin Rizzo & Heather Wolfe, with additional thanks to Rebecca Niles) is thrilled to announce the launch of our beta site. Throughout this test period we will add transcriptions and new features to the site, with a view to making EMMO’s corpus an indispensable resource for early modern scholars in the years to come.… Continue Reading
Manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are going digital with added features for users! The launch of a beta website for Early Modern Manuscripts Online next month will provide encoded transcriptions to accompany manuscript images and metadata. The number of transcriptions will be limited at first (a few hundred letters), but the EMMO corpus online will grow over time into a broad resource for research on a variety of manuscripts.… Continue Reading
A question I often hear from paleographers who contribute transcriptions to Early Modern Manuscripts Online (or EMMO) is: What are you going to do with all these transcriptions? It’s a good question—central to the whole project, actually—but it’s also a complicated one. The short answer I usually give goes something like this: We aim to gather multiple independent transcriptions for each digitized page and compare them to create an aggregate transcription which an expert paleographer then checks over for accuracy.… Continue Reading
The answer to last week’s Crocodile mystery is, as some of you guessed, £135 15s 0d (or 135 pounds, 15 shillings). This amount is a snippet of one entry made on a page in Folger MS V.b.308, the account book of Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot (a.k.a. Bess of Hardwick), the Countess of Shrewsbury. Her steward, Edward Whalley, apparently kept the accounts in this bound manuscript, dated ca.… Continue Reading
There are thousands of manuscripts sitting quietly amongst the Folger’s ever-growing collection which Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) aims to transcribe. Earlier this year EMMO collaborated with Zooniverse, a hugely successful online crowd-sourcing platform, so that people all over the world could join us in this transcription project. We are delighted to announce that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has since jumped aboard this digital enterprise as well, and on December 10th Shakespeare’s World officially launched!… Continue Reading
Over the past few months, EMMO has been busy with several first-ever activities connected to transcribing manuscripts at the Folger.
In August, we transcribed excerpts from over twenty four manuscripts currently exhibited in the Age of Lawyers Exhibition (running until January 3rd 2016). These documents cover such fascinating topics as Customs of copyholders, Treatises on English law, By-laws of Warwick, a List of Jurors, and a List of Charges in legal Latin!… Continue Reading
Yes, the answer to last week’s Crocodile mystery is as obvious as it seemed. We were looking for a number which unites the table, the fractions, and the superfluous but artful penmanship. Answer: 60, of course!
What we are actually looking at here is nothing more than a simple division sum from the 17th century where A = 1/2 = 30, B = 1/4 = 15, C = 1/5 = 12, D = 1/3 = 20, E = 1/6 = 10.… Continue Reading
When it comes to the subject of tagging or encoding manuscript transcriptions in XML (extensible markup language) for Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), two important questions are how much should we tag and when should we do it.
With thousands of pages from a variety of genres, the “how much” question is a big one. For example, should tags be used to provide information about ink color, shifts in hand, size or ornamentation of letters, illustrations, marginalia, flourishes, indentations, spacing, symbols, quotations, layout, structure, lines, paper material, historical/literary connections, etymology, smudges, etc.,… Continue Reading
