If Text Then Code

James Merrill Linn: Town Hero

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Fortunately, James Merrill Linn’s handwriting and I share some history, so I did not have as difficult of a time transcribing his writing this time around. I transcribed two letters, one to his brother and one to the Lewisburg Chronicle. I think it is fascinating to have to basically decode a letter in order to read it. I really enjoyed transcribing the letter to the Chronicle in particular because it was different from his journals and letters I had read in the past. While I would consider myself a sufficient subscriber, there were still many words and phrases that were indecipherable. I discovered a range of solutions to my problems. First, I would search the letters I could read into Google. This worked maybe 20% of the time to find the word that I was searching for. This is one example where I screen-shot-2016-11-18-at-8-59-53-pmknew it was a name but could not figure out every letter to get the correct name. So I searched “Beauveyard” into Google, where it suggested searching for “Beauregard” instead. It turns out that he was a famous Southern military officer, and was the first prominent general of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War. Another way I discovered a word was with the help of my peers. They proved incredibly helpful many times because they provided a fresh set of eyes or had seen the same word in their letter. If none of these ways worked I forfeited and marked it up as unreadable.

Thankfully the Linn letters are located in the Archives, because in the end it is helpful to have the option of seeing them in person. I thought it was beneficial to have the option of looking at the physical letter with a magnifying glass, or zooming in on the photo of the letter screen-shot-2016-11-18-at-9-22-52-pmon my computer. I found that both ways were equally helpful. Sometimes the computer image would blur the word too much that I could not see the one line that was necessary to decipher the word. On the other hand, it was helpful to have it on the computer because I could zoom in as close as I wanted. I also liked transcribing from the computer image because I would constantly lose my spot in his letter when looking at in while in the Archives.

Interestingly, the letter that James wrote to the Lewisburg Chronicle is very dissimilar to his journal entry written on the same date. Linn wrote his journal solely for himself, assuming that he would be the only one to read them, so he wrote about his personal experiences, rather than what was going on in the war. His letter to the Lewisburg Chronicle was meant for the whole public to have read. This is why he wrote about where they were going, the Colonels and officers he encountered, and their battles. He wrote about the batteries, the rebels, and the swamps they had to wade through rather than about the weather because that is what the people of Lewisburg would have preferred to read about.

The Linn Letter Process

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All of the transcription we have done in this unit has been very much a collaborative effort.  From the very first transcription activity we did, there wouldn’t have been much progress made had we been working alone and isolated.  More sets of eyes looking at a single line is one of the best ways to speed up the transcription process.  A lot of words can be recognized with just a simple look-over, but some words are more challenging to interpret.  The best method I’ve found for these words is to go through one character at a time and try to compare and transcribe each letter.  Generally, these problematic words arise when the start or the end of a word are hard to read, so getting the other part and making an educated guess is also a valid strategy.

The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI
The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI

There were a number of advantages to working with the actual documents in the Bucknell Archives.  The simple black and white scans we were using as the source of our transcriptions lost a lot of details that were in the original letters.  For instance, one word that was giving me trouble in the scanned document was something that looked like it should have been ‘had,’ but had way too many lines to be those three letters.  When I finally got to look at that part of the document in the archive, it became apparent that the word was indeed ‘had,’ but Linn had originally written ‘were’ there first, and changed the word to ‘had’ by writing over it.  This intricacy was lost in the monochrome black scan we were originally working with.  However, the processing that went into creating the digital scan did help to pull better information than the human eye could.  It’s easy to see bleed-through on the physical document, which made some words harder to read.  However, in the scan, this bleed-through was filtered out.

Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.
Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.

A lot of what Linn writes about in the March 2nd letter and journal entry are the same, the visit from Morris, learning of the occupation of Nashville, Memphis, and Savannah, etc.  He even describes these events in nearly the exact same words in both the letter and the journal.  However, in his journal, he noted that the instructions from Morris were against army orders.  This is not something he notified his brother of.  He also spent more time in his journal complaining about the little irritations of everyday life (poor weather, broken kitchen equipment).  In his letter home, he spent more time discussing the state of the war and world overall, talking about US relations with the Rebels, England, and Mexico.

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Creative Commons License Bucknell University Humanities 271 Course by Diane Jakacki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.