Re: transcription from handwritten text

Hi Paul,

Am 27.01.2017 um 21:47 schrieb Paul Schaffner:
> Has anyone used an outside firm or agency to transcribe and apply
> markup to modern handwritten text? Or can recommend any capable
> of doing so accurately?

thanks for your question, like you, I would be very interested if other 
people would have tried that,! I had the expression it was not very 
common, but should be considered as an option more often. Anyway, I can 
really recommend it.

In the Hidden Kosmos project 
(http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/hidden-kosmos) we worked together with 
a vendor, textloop (cf. http://textloop.de/ and 
http://textloop.de/kosmos/), to transcribe 19th cent. handwritten text. 
The vendor transcribed and annotated a total of ca. 2500 mansucript 
pages in record time and with outstanding accuracy. They delivered 
full-blown TEI accordung to specifications developed based on the DTA 
Base Format (DTABf, http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/doku/basisformat) 
with some additional tags specific to handwritten texts like additions, 
deletions, etc. Susanne Haaf from the DTA presented some of these 
aspects at the TEI-MM 2015 in Lyon, and there is an upcoming paper on 
the DTABf for manuscripts to appear in the jTEI.

You can see the results of textloop's work here in the Deutsches 
Textarchiv collection, and that way you also get an impression of the 
difficulty of the manuscripts. These are different student's notebooks 
documenting Alexander von Humboldts famous Kosmos-Lectures (1827/28). 
textloop transcribed these five notebooks:

http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/patzig_msgermfol841842_1828
http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/libelt_hs6623ii_1828
http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/nn_oktavgfeo79_1828
http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/nn_n0171w1_1828
http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/parthey_msgermqu1711_1828

It was ideal for us to work with a vendor for this project since we 
could focus on meticulous quality assurance, deeper annotation, 
cross-linking the documents, identifying scribes, tagging <persName>s 
and many other things that we would never have gotten round to if we 
would have had to transcribe the manuscripts ourselves. I am sure 
Martina Goedel from textloop will be happy to tell you more about how 
she organised her work and what this experience was like for her -- 
since transcribing manuscripts (and not prints) via vendor still seems 
to be unusual and, in the Hidden Kosmos project, was a 'first' for both 
sides.

Again, I'd be very interested to hear if others have experience with 
that workflow. Also, Paul, I'd be interested to see what the manuscripts 
you consider to have keyed by a vendor look like and, of course, am 
curious if this works out for you.

Best wishes
Christian


Christian Thomas
Hidden Kosmos: Reconstructing A. v. Humboldt’s »Kosmos-Lectures«
http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/hidden-kosmos

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
Mohrenstraße 40, 10117 Berlin
Raum: 414, Tel. +49 (0)30 2093 66 147
E-Mail: [email protected]
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>
> (This is a bit off-topic, so you may want to reply off-list.)
>
> Paul