One of my current research projects involves digitizing different versions of Hawthorne short story. I’ve been encoding different versions of the text so that I can discover the changes that editors made to the story as it circulated around the country in the nineteenth century. One of the most time-tested ways of transcribing documents accurately, however, is to work through a text with a partner: one partner reads the original text aloud while the second partner follows along in the transcribed text. When the two texts don’t match up, the team works together to figure out where the discrepancy lies and what changes need to be made to the transcription. Editors use such a system because our eyes and memory are, when unassisted, unreliable—one writer or editor is unlikely to catch all his or her own errors. For most of my project’s history, however, I’ve been transcribing alone: at…

Read More