Collaborative Transcription of the Regiment of Princes Variant Collation Tables with FromThePage

FromThePage is a versatile open source online transcription platform designed by Ben and Sara Brumfeld (@benwbrum, @saracarl) of Austin, Texas. The Hoccleve Archive uses an instance of FromThePage that is hosted by The University of Texas Libraries. We invite all teachers, students, and scholars of Hoccleve to sign up for an account on this platform and begin transcribing!

The goal of this project is to accumulate tabular transcriptions of all the Variant Collation Tables in our collection, and to verify them against the fifteenth-century manuscripts they represent. The resulting data set will enable the creation of a dynamic online critical edition of the Regiment of Princes and be open to anyone to use for other kinds of digital humanities and medieval scholarship. Eventually all 46 sets of collation tables will be uploaded as individual ‘Works’ in this FromThePage collection, and we will be including on this page a pathway to view corresponding manuscript images that transcribers will be able to use for reference and verification as they work. Since we are currently in the very first phase of the transcription process, our immediate priority is getting as many first-round transcription pages done as possible and then reviewing them to insure that the digital transcriptions faithfully represent the information on the images of the handwritten documents in the collection. A later phase of this process will involve sorting the transcription data by manuscript and checking the transcription against the manuscript sources themselves.

To begin transcribing, please download the following MSWord docx file for detailed instructions about how to navigate our collections in FromThePage and how to create transcriptions that will fit properly into the data set we are building as a whole, along with the two template files: one regular and one for collation tables dealing with marginal glosses.

Thank you for participating! Please email Elon or Robin with any questions you have about transcribing, using the data that can be exported from FromThePage, lesson ideas you may have for using this project with graduate or undergraduate students (we’d love to include your lessons on this site!), or the project as a whole.