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. Clicking again will enlarge the image so that you can get a very close view of the words on the page. You may want to consider right-clicking the image when it first comes up so that it opens in a new tab; that way, you can toggle between (1) the standard view and the box where you'll do your transcribing and (2) the enlarged view, where you can closely examine any words that are hard to make out.

You must be logged into Scripto in order to transcribe. There's a login link right at the top of this page. Log in with the username/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. If you navigate away from your transcription without saving, your content will be lost. For peace of mind, you may want to consider typing your transcription in a plain-text editor (TextEdit on Mac, for example, or Notepad on Windows), pasting it into the transcription box, and the saving.

For each image, transcribe only what is on the letter surface it represents. Don't worry about reproducing line breaks or indentations. Leave a blank line between paragraphs. Don't normalize spelling; instead, transcribe the words as Merv wrote them.

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.