#also theyre made from altered ancient items

[nitroish]

ive resorted to taking photos of my screen so i can share stuff. anyway, this is my legend of zelda heart's hypothetical creation because the rp mentioned wings and ooc also was talking about wings but prosthetics... and loz heart could hypothetically Make wings himself, so. now im attached to the idea.

[theritestuff-blog1]

Commonplace Mysteries

In early May we launched Transcribing Faith, a crowdsourcing site as part of an ongoing series of digital tools associated with Religious Change, 1450-1700. With the site, we invited the public to help us transcribe over 450 scanned pages from two manuscript items in the Newberry’s collection, and by doing so help reveal some of the “secrets” that they contained. (more have since been added!)

We selected volumes that would particularly benefit from this work. As handwritten manuscripts, it is difficult to get good transcriptions even with the strongest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software available. Additionally, these items are unique to the Newberry’s collection and therefore were unlikely to have been transcribed elsewhere or published in book form by a different institution. These considerations coupled with the fact that the manuscripts themselves were particularly interesting –  a book of magical charms, an early-modern commonplace book – made them ideal candidates for the first round of this project. (Atlas Obscura wrote about the Book of Magical Charms!)

So far, the response has exceeded our expectations: as of writing, we have received over 350, mostly complete, crowdsourced page transcriptions from users. One can now use the transcribed text for analysis and research. In the commonplace book, you can now find insight into the cultural experience of the writer.  For example, one transcribed page contains descriptions of “games” played throughout the ancient world:

“The mexicans play with a cudgell like a paste rouler wth theyr feete tossinge the same high and lowe in the ayre as a ball . . . In prometheus Academy at Athens is an alter from wch they runne wth burninge lampes into the citty the quenched torche giues place to his successor, the farthest carier hath the price . . . The Thracians hange a rope from a beame wth a riuinge knot therin vnder it lyes a rounde stone ox wth a sworde in his hande puts his necke in the rope standinge on the stone, if hee can cut the rope so hee escapes else hee hanges .”

While another page seemingly was set aside for “jokes,” like this:

“In the Rebellion a villain stole into the King's Mews, where the light Horse were stationed and cut off the tails of all the Horses in the Regiment. When it was discovered, the Captain, greatly vexed, cried out, among other ejaculations, "What must we do" do," said a wag near him," sell them by whole sale", why so," said the Captain, Because, replied he, it is plain to see we cannot re-tail them”

Obviously, these books contain a wealth of information that could be useful to scholars. So how do we make sure that the information in these transcriptions are preserved and made accessible?

Once a page gets transcribed completely and accurately, the transcription is funneled to a series of asset management systems where the page scan is stored. After verifying completion, we add the finished transcription to our Digital Asset Management system in the metadata of the accompanying page image, where it will be preserved in perpetuity. Then we will add it to the metadata of a Content Management System – in this case on our Digital Newberry collection site, where the digital copy of the manuscript is made available to users.

In helping to transcribe these works, users are helping future scholarship not only by creating more human-readable transcriptions, but also by creating access points for researchers to find them. So if someone is studying historical uses for the Valerian flower, they might come across the book of magical charms and do a quick search on the Digital Newberry site for “valerian,” where they would come across the following spell for a type of love potion:

… and one for a fishing lure:

Without these transcriptions, scholars have to either hope that the manuscript has an index or go through the painstaking process of transcribing the work themselves. By harnessing the power of the crowd we can, in effect, conjure up spirits and unleash the hidden power of these texts in a way that has not been possible until recently, an idea that the anonymous authors of these two manuscripts no doubt would have found very intriguing.

Help us transcribe these texts (and more to come!) at http://publications.newberry.org/dig/rc-transcribe

You can also view the Book of Magical Charms  and Commonplace-Book on our Digital Newberry collection website. Transcriptions will start being added to the site over the next couple of months.

Matt Krc, Digital Initiatives Librarian