Transcription – Start Here

Hello there! Welcome to the Transcribe Georgian Papers Guides!

Here you will find helpful directions and tips on how to transcribe and review GPP documents. As a transcriber and reviewer for the GPP, you are acting as an integral part of the process to make these documents accessible to a broader audience and facilitate further research and discovery.

 

Main Principles:

The main aim of Transcribe Georgian Papers is to produce diplomatic transcripts, not critical texts or digital editions. Diplomatic transcription means you transcribe, as best you can, the text as it appears on the page without correcting spellings, expanding abbreviations, symbols, etc.

Our motto for diplomatic transcription is do your best and don’t worry about trying to be perfect.

These diplomatic transcriptions are a core resource that will be used for further research and exploration of the Georgian period and beyond.

 

Essentials to GPP Transcription:

Encoding

Encoding or Markup is an essential part of the GPP transcription process. Transcribers are asked to encode documents to identify common features of a document such as formatting, words and marks, additions and deletions, or indecipherable words. This is accomplished by "tagging" – marking up documents with "tags" to highlight specific things in the text.

Tags are terms encased in double brackets [[tag]]. GPP transcription uses single tags: [[image]], and paired tags that require an opening and closing tag: [[underline]] George [[/underline]]

A single space is included on either side of the [[tag]] just like words.

Encoding enriches the documents, which allows them to be processed by computers and makes it possible to carry out refined searches and analysis on documents.

 

How the process works

Transcribe Georgian Papers How It Works Graphic


We have two roles available to anyone who signs-up to be a volunteer: transcriber and reviewer.

The process has three stages:

  1. A volunteer selects a document to transcript. When that volunteer decides they’ve finished transcribing the document, they submit it for review.

  2. A different volunteer can review the transcription and make edits to the transcription if necessary, and mark the document fully transcribed.

  3. Once marked fully transcribed, the finished transcript is sent to William & Mary Libraries where it will be given a second review, and then the transcript will be made available for use or undergo additional work.

 

How do you tell when to transcribe or review a document?

Look for these color progress bars:

Transcription Status Progress Graphic

 

A Few Special Statuses:

You will see three special statuses on some documents in the site:

 GPP Scholar Reviewed
This status denotes documents where a Georgian Papers Programme scholar with expert domain knowledge carried out an additional review of the transcription, and signed off on it.

GPP Scholar Reviewed status graphic

Under Evaluation
Documents with Under Evaluation status are not available for transcription yet! We’re evaluating methods for transcribing these. Once we decide on a method, these documents will be made available.

Transcription Status Under Evaluation 

Transkribus
In addition to you, our volunteer transcribers, the GPP is experimenting with a handwritten text recognition platform, Transkribus. You’ll see the Transkribus logo on collections being transcribed via this tool. The collections with this logo are not available for you to transcribe; we include this notice on the site to let people know about the Transkribus project.

Transkribus Collection Example Graphic

 

Ready to begin?

The information and guidelines below will help you.

Remember our motto: Do your best and don’t worry about trying to be perfect!

  1. Login to your account (We are no longer accepting new accounts - apologies! Existing accounts can still login.)

  2. Core Transcription Guidelines: Explains the most common features you will come across in the documents.

  3. Advance Transcription Guidelines: Describes the less-frequent features you may come upon in the documents; such as: account lists, hash marks, footnotes & margin notes, etc.

  4. Reviewer Instructions: Describes the steps for reviewing the transcription of a document.


Return to Top