Transcription Reflection

In my transcription, the author describes various heating and cooling methods to balance the humors and help specific body parts. Prior to transcribing this piece, I had never given much thought to the healing practices of the middle ages. I was interested in the balance of how medieval and innovative some of these ideas were. For example, I had never considered the process of laxatives in this era and how the English believed that they worked.

When transcribing middle English, I admittedly struggled. I expected the differences in spelling, yet they initially puzzled me. As the words on my page repeated, I found that I became significantly more comfortable as my transcription progressed. With help from Dr. Reynolds, I worked out specific accents and symbols that I was unfamiliar with. Once I figured out the Roman numerals, I found the project to be a bit more approachable. I found that though the errors made the piece harder for me to transcribe, it made the piece feel uniquely more human. Specifically the “xiiij” error made the piece feel more real and tangible, despite its origin being so long. I would like to know how much experimentation went into the process of making this manuscript. The attention to detail impressed me in the one page that I transcribed, and I would ultimately like to know the author’s process. Did they do all of these experiments? Were they common knowledge among physicians? Did they collaborate to gain access to all of this information?

I think that encoding a text like this with XML mark-up makes it more accessible to the modern reader. The ability to search specific tags or headings could help answer questions that scholars may have about the recipes, which ultimately makes the document easier to navigate. By encoding it with markup, groups like the Making and Knowing Project could re-create experiments more simply by searching for similar projects to run at the same time. Ultimately, the choice to utilize XML mark-up on a project like this not only makes the project more accessible to institutions, but for individuals if they should choose to view the project. Smith claims that the translator’s challenge exists within the piece’s “tacit” knowledge, or translating the sensory experience of the piece to written word. By encoding a text with XML tags, the process endures a similar struggle: balancing the act of reading that work and making it technologically compatible. The digital translator has to apply the human-written text to XML tags in an attempt to organize the often erroneous text in a manner compatible with technology. Smith’s “artisan” and the modern coder both balance the complexity of conveying the implicit meaning of a text into a hierarchical experience to imply a code to the project’s reader.