Hello all! Some of you may already know this, but for those who don't, I am part of an international team producing a new edition of scholarly transcriptions of the nearly 900 original legal papers of the Salem witch hunt, due to be published in the next few years by Cambridge University Press. Work on the edition is at a turning point. The first pass at transcribing the documents has basically been completed, and as we go through the second pass some preliminary decisions need to be continued or revised. There is no consensus among the group of transcribers, and Prof. Bernard Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief, needs to make a decision as to the final choice. Thus, he has asked me to pass along this request for input, since we assume that the subscribers to this list are among the folks who will take a keen interest in the volume when it is published. As of now, the transcriptions generally follow seventeenth-century usage, including: 1) Abbreviations. There is a plentiful occurrence of y-superscript-e for "the," y-superscript-t for "that," etc. The letter "y" used this way is referred to as "thorn" by some, and represents the "th" sound, not a "y" sound. Also, a macron -- a line over a letter or two -- was a common abbreviation indicator, while the modern apostrophe abbreviation ("don't") was not. 2) Superscripts. Other abbreviations include some of the letters in superscript, such as W-superscript-m for "William," and Maj-superscript-ties for "Majesties." For comparison, these are rendered in the transcriptions published by Boyer & Nissenbaum in 1977 with an apostrophe, as "W'm" without the superscript and "Maj'ties." 3) Retaining letters v, i, and ff. In older handwriting, the pair of "u" and "v" used the same letter-form, as did the pair "i" and "j". In our current transcriptions, an effort has been made to identify exactly which letter-form was used, so in some cases, the word "used," might be transcribed as "vsed," "just" might be transcribed as "ivst," and "John" could be "Iohn." Also, a common form of the capital "F" in handwriting at the time was rendered as two lower-case case f's: "ff" -- so that the name of the country "France" was sometimes spelled "ffrance." A decision needs to be made as to whether to stay with our current literal transcriptions, modernize it all, or modernize some while retaining some seventeenth-century forms. A leading possibilty for this third option would be to retain superscripts and abbreviations, including "thorn," while modernizing v, i, and ff as u, j, and F. Our team includes people from the disciplines of language studies and history. Bernie believes that historians using the volume would not have a problem with seventeenth-century forms, but a more general audience might. This audience would draw primarily from those who have a serious, though not professional, historical interest in the documents, including the large number of descendants interested in doing research: you! It would also include students making use of the materials. He is not worried about graduate students, but he is uncertain as to how undergraduates would do with seventeenth-century forms. He is collecting opinions from the both the academic community and this list on this issue with the full awareness that he may not get unanimity of opinion. He hopes nobody will be offended if the edition finally comes out without following the advice of a given individual. He is getting all kinds of intelligent, reasonable arguments for all kinds of routes to follow on this issue, and takes all considered opinions very seriously, as he certainly will yours. Please let Bernie (berrosenthal@aol.com) or me (margo@ogram.org) know your thoughts. If you need clarification on any of the issues, please don't hesitate to let me know. Thank you very much from both of us in advance for your help. Cheers, Margo

On 5/15/03, Margo Burns <margo@ogram.org> wrote: >Hello all! > >Some of you may already know this, but for those who don't, I am part >of an international team producing a new edition of scholarly >transcriptions of the nearly 900 original legal papers of the Salem >witch hunt, due to be published in the next few years by Cambridge >University Press. > <snipped> Margo, This sounds like an ideal project for publication as an eBook or Web site. You could use pop-ups or roll-overs for definitions and "footnotes" that don't require the reader to lose their place in the original document, you could have side-by-side (or linked) images of the originals, and transcriptions in more readable (and electronically searchable) text, and hyperlinks to more lengthy articles explaining details of specialized topics, written by the experts on those -- even more than one article per item where there are differences of opinion among the experts. For people who are skeptical of a particular transcription, the original image is there for them to make up their own minds about it without having to try to digest the entire opus in that more difficult to scan form. The lovely thing about ePublishing is that you can do everything your project lead is considering, and do it with a minimum of intrusiveness on each reader's chosen viewing style. If you need information about ePublishing tools or a consultation, please see http://www.epublishing-info.com. Cheers, Katherine -- Katherine Cochrane The CD-Info Company tel: +1 707.845.6974 fax: +1 707.516.0419 SMS: 7078456974@sms.edgewireless.com