A note on terminology, and an addendum (and correction) to my PhD thesis 1. How did I miss that? Doing research, it’s easy to find yourself going down rabbit holes, chasing answers that seem to always elude your grasp. You do your best, but still have to resign yourself to unsatisfactory results. In my case, […]
Tag Archives: argh
The reliability of “Winwood’s Memorials”
The three-volume Memorials of affairs of state in the reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I, collected (chiefly) from the original papers of … Sir Ralph Winwood, edited by Edmund Sawyer, published in 1725 (2nd ed. 1727), is a hugely convenient work for those working on late Elizabethan and early Stuart State Papers, since […]
Woo, palaeography! (argh)
So, I’m transcribing bits of documents I photographed at the Staffordshire Record Office and the William Salt Library in Stafford last September. Most of the docs are older than the ones I usually deal with, which means I have to struggle a bit to read the handwriting. Today’s post is a celebration of the idiocy […]
more on the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents
TNA SP 94/12 ff.144-147 is a 4-page document entitled: “Note of my letters of aduertisments from spayne, Italy & other parts from Jan 1605 vntill [missing]” In other words, it is a list of letters received during 1605. It was compiled by Thomas Wilson, secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, in charge of intelligencing relating to […]
Lady Day (and the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents)
I just realized that today is Lady Day – that is, Annunciation. Once upon a time, this was New Year’s Day. It probably derives from the date being originally set on the Spring equinox, which makes a pretty sensible first day of the year if your concept of the world derives from observations of the sun. […]
Rant about code (“MS Office uses XML”)
The new .docx etc formats of the newer versions of Microsoft Office are done in XML. Hence the -x in the extension. The problem with this, however, is something we all know: all MS programs are bloated pieces of shit. Those of you who occasionally fiddle with HTML will probably have experimented with the oh-this-is-convenient […]
NaTheWriMo Day 24: Wrong month
This is really the wrong month for me to be doing a NaTheWriMo. What I’m doing atm is fiddling around with the specs of my edition – this includes lots of thinking about little things, namely how to represent manuscript feature X in my finished digital edition, and thus it involves less of the Writing […]
NaTheWriMo Day 16
Not all bad: my word tally remains painfully low, but then I was tweaking code all evening, and that went quite well, I think. TEI XML is a bugger to be sure, but on the other hand when you have a set of restrictions it is comfortably easy going – unlike writing, where the blank […]
NaTheWriMo Day 15: Pep talk needed
This is Neil’s pep talk to NaNoWriMoists. He’s right, of course. A journey of 50,000 words may start with a small step, but the point is that every step along the way is a small one: one little word at a time. Which is a relief of sorts. My word count, while quite a lot […]
NaTheWriMo Day 11
Better. Not much, but better. NaTheWriMo November 2010 Day: 11 Word count: 2,665 Transcription word count: 17,600 Blog entries: 10