Transcribe Merv's Letters

Each item on the Merv Writes website is a letter, aka a document. When you visit a document's page on the site, you'll see the files (aka images) that make up the document. If you scroll down below the images, you'll see metadata about the item and, below that, the heading Transcribe This Item. Beneath the heading is a link to each file (image) constituting the document (letter).

Clicking the link to an image will bring up the image in a viewer that will let you zoom and navigate within the image.

You must be logged into Scripto in order to transcribe. After requesting and receive account credentials, log in with the username and password that were sent to you. When you're logged into Scripto, you'll see, beneath the image you wish to transcribe:

Current Page Transcription [edit] [wiki] [history]

Click [edit], and a transcription box will open below. Type your transcription in the box. Periodically save your transcription by clicking the large, not-very-intuitively named Edit This Transcription button beneath the box. Important: Your transcription content is not automatically saved at regular intervals. If you navigate away from your transcription without saving manually, your content will be lost. For lengthy transcriptions, consider copying the text you've entered and pasting it in a separate file before saving, in case your internet connection is lost during the saving process. (Again, though, if you've saved periodically along the way, you won't risk losing much if there's a glitch in your final save.)

For each image, transcribe only what is on the letter surface it represents.

• Don't worry about reproducing line breaks, indentations, or end-of-line hyphenation. Leave a blank line between paragraphs.
• Don't normalize spelling (e.g., don't change "colour" to "color") ; instead, transcribe the words as Merv wrote them.
• Don't correct misspellings or typos, or supply missing words; again, transcribe what Merv actually wrote.
• Do insert space between words that Merv may have run together when typing, as the typewriter, rather than Merv, may have been responsible for the missing space (e.g., do change "nothappy" to "not happy").

In general, strive to accurately transcribe what Merv actually wrote, warts and all, but don't fuss about creating a one-to-one correspondence between the marks on the page and your transcription. It's fine to intervene modestly to capture Merv's likely intention (e.g., by separating words that he most likely did not mean to run together), but you shouldn't seek to improve what he wrote by introducing corrections, and you shouldn't supply words that he did not actually write or type.

If a word or letter is illegible, type [illegible] at that point in your transcription.

Every time you click Edit this transcription, your transcription will be saved. So don't feel that you have to completely transcribe a file in one sitting. You can come back to the file at a later time, click [edit], and resume transcribing. Remember to click Edit this transcription to save your work!

Individual image transcriptions will be periodically sewn together by the site administrator so that the document (item) page for the letter shows a running transcription of the entire letter, combining the transcriptions of the individual pages.