Short of writing this blog out in longhand beforehand, I could never consider doing anything other than typing it. Things are a bit different where my grandmother's, and decreasingly, my grandfather's diaries are concerned. In this case the question is: what is the best way to transcribe the text?
I've tried scanning. Apart from the cumbersome business of having to turn the pages of the diary before placing it in the scanner, the real problem is then getting the computer to "recognise" the diary so that it can be edited and presented in digital form. For this you need OCR software for Optical Character Recognition, but as far as I know this software can only recognize typed text or, at a pinch, handprinting but not handwriting. So that's a non-starter.
Dictating. Software like Naturally Speaking are pretty good at transcribing your speech into text which you can then edit and correct. But, I don't know, I find it hard to get into the habit of speaking into a microphone, although I've tried several times in the past.
Typing. This is where we came in. Although I'm not all that fast on the keyboard, it is still, after all these years of first writing and then typing, the medium I feel happiest in. The truth is, I suppose, that few of us are prepared to give a new way of working a fair trial. We are anxious in the first instance to try out so'ething new if only to relieve the tedium of our daily lives, but unless the learning curve is very very smooth we soon return to our tried and trusted ways.
Posted with Blogsy
For my own great-great-grandmother's diaries, I ended up building a frame out of scrap lumber I could attach a digital camera to. The image quality from a 5mp camera was quite good--though I've since moved up to 12mp--and it was far easier and quicker to shoot the pages. Best of all, I didn't have to flatten the spines to capture the images.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for the information, Ben. And what a fascinating diary. It could hardly be more different from my grandmother's world of - let's face it - privilege. Long gone for us, I'm afraid!
ReplyDeleteI'll experiment again with the camera but my idea would be for the image to replace the typed text, whereas you have thoughtfully provided both! Best regards, Barnaby
Thanks! I guess one question you need to answer when you're deciding on type vs. image ("facsimile edition" sounds so much fancier!) is how to convey the diary to the readership you have in mind. In my case, I want to be able to produce bound, printed books for the diarist's descendents, which (unless I were to go with expensive facsimile editions) requires typing.
ReplyDeleteI've also found that putting the diary online has connected me to new people. Currently the most active person transcribing the diary is the great-nephew of the diarist's mailman -- he shares the same name and was thrilled to see his great uncle (and a few other family members) mentioned in the book. That wouldn't have happened with just images, since of course Google can't parse cursive out of a scan.
All that assumes that the diary material may be published or made public, which may not be the case for you.