Friday, January 24, 2003

U. of Michigan Team Reconstructs the Daybook of a 16th-Century Londoner By BROCK READ The daybook of Henry Machyn, a 16th-century Londoner, is a treasure for students of language and history, according to Richard W. Bailey, a professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But there's a problem with the journal: It was badly burned in a fire, and the only published versions of the text are rife with linguistic and narrative inaccuracies. Mr. Bailey and a team of graduate students have set out to make Machyn's journal more useful and accessible to scholars by reconstructing it and putting the results online. A London Provisioner's Day Book collects the fruits of their labor -- at present, a few pages; by the end of the year, the whole book. Machyn earned his living providing trappings for the funeral processions that often stretched throughout London streets. He maintained the journal from 1550 to 1563, recording detailed accounts of key events in the city's history, including murders, executions, and the coronation of Elizabeth I. "Essentially, he describes what happened that you might see by standing on a street corner," says Mr. Bailey. The journal made its way into the collection of Robert Cotton, an antiquarian whose holdings also included a manuscript of the Norse legend Beowulf. But in the early 18th century, a fire ravaged Cotton's library, burning the outer margins of Machyn's diary and rendering about 15 percent of his words unreadable. Many sections of the book had already been published by John Strype, a British historian, but Strype had sprinkled his version with 18th-century linguistic tics and rearranged events to give Machyn's accounts more narrative pull. In 1848, the historian J.G. Nichols published an edition of the daybook -- still the account of record for scholars -- in which he guessed at the content of the damaged sections. But Nichols's and Strype's corrupted versions of the manuscript aren't as useful as a clean text for professors like Mr. Bailey who use Machyn's journal to search for clues about regional dialects and Elizabethan English. "I teach courses in the history of languages," he says. "I'm always interested in finding transcripts of the way real people actually talked." The reconstruction project had its roots in one such course, a graduate-level class on Elizabethan English that Mr. Bailey taught in 1995. Working from photographs taken by the British Library, where the journal now resides, Mr. Bailey taught his students to decode Machyn's spelling and handwriting. The team then "reconstructed" pages from the journal, transcribing text from the images and completing the missing portions by adding material extracted from Strype's manuscript and, occasionally, from Nichols's edition. "Students love working on the project. They think it's really terrific," according to Mr. Bailey. But he says that the digital journal should also be a great boon for historians, who will have broader access to an important book -- and a chance to read it in a version that closely approximates its original state. "The book contains all sorts of little details that historians are interested in" -- including information about the renewal of Protestantism under Elizabeth I, about changes in British funeral practices, and about the riotous Christmas and New Year's Day pageants held at the time. When the site is completed, historians will be able to search the text for specific terms and phrases, and to identify what parts are direct transcriptions and what are portions filled in by Mr. Bailey and his students; words adapted from Strype's and Nichols's versions appear in colored type with citations noting their origins. "We're also making available the actual images, so if you don't like our reading of something, you can just click and examine it," Mr. Bailey says. The digitized journal will be made available as part of a collection of historical e-books sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Texas admissions plan has not increased diversity at flagship campuses, study finds White House objects to Senate proposal to increase maximum Pell Grant award Hacker steals personal data on foreign students at U. of Kansas NTSB tells colleges to enforce stricter safety policies for traveling athletes Updates on billion-dollar campaigns at 21 universities U. of Michigan team reconstructs the daybook of a 16th-century Londoner