Transcribe: Notebook 229

[Cambridge-Digital-Library]

Transcribe: Notebook 229

Link to text file to edit:
Notebook 229, covering 6 July to 14 August 1976 (CCCC14/6/2/1/229)

Link to images of original:
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-CCCC-00014-00006-00002-00001-00229

[dawnsl2020]

Hi Andy,
I have just done a few pages and I thought I'd stop now. Will you check how it is going, to make sure I'm making no awful mistakes?!
I have a couple of questions - I am doing fractions (1/2 and 3/4 so far) by copying and pasting from a Word document but they are illegible when I read it back. Should I be doing them some other way? He writes them long hand as a small 1 over a line with 2 below it. I have put his inches symbol as "
I hope that is okay. So one and a half inches looks like this: 1½" . Is that right? It's as near as I can get to his original.
When I am pretty sure what a word means or a symbol should I write it in?
E.g. I came across u/w which could almost have said w/w but later I saw it again and it clearly meant u/w (i.e. his shorthand for underwood, because in the second instance he then referred directly to hazel). So I am convinced it is u/w - but should I put [????] anyway for that first instance which is not 100% clear?
Also there was one line where he had written Littorella then crossed it out and written something else just above. Then, later I suppose, in a different pen, he had written Stet before it, and heavily crossed out the addition above. He obviously decided it was Littorella after all.
I transcribed this as Stet [!!!!]Littorella[!!!!] [????] because it all referred to the same line and the heavily crossed out bit was illegible (so I put it in as [????]). I transcribed it all because I understand that we are meant to - is how I did it okay?

That was very enjoyable. Lovely to see his hand and the brevity of his notes. So sad to read about the Dutch Elm Disease (he put DED).
Thank you for having me!
Dawn Lawrence

[Cambridge-Digital-Library]

Hi @dawnsl2020,
Of course, no worries! - It can be a bit daunting at first.
Looks like a great start!

The fractions look fine to me - if it's quicker/easier you can just type them out as 1/2, or in the case of the one and a half you could add a space better the one and the half fraction, ie: 1 1/2" either way would work ok though, so whatever you feel comfortable with. The main priority is to type it a close as you can to what it looks like as you say.
Don't worry too much about the odd mistake either.

In the case of u/w that's a pretty good conclusion if it seems reasonable - if you're not sure you can do a [????] and then if you realise something like this later on then you can go back and edit it. But if you have any degree of confidence by all means put in what you think it is even if you're not 100% sure.

The Littorella one is a head scratcher - in short, yes what you've done is fine. In more complex transcription methods we would have ways to identify the sequence that he wrote it, crossed it out, added something else, then crossed that out, then added stet. But to keep things simple with this project we're really only aiming to have as much of the text as we can. The most literal/accurate way to do this here might be to do it as:
Stet [!!!!]Littorella[!!!!] [!!!!][????][!!!!] or Stet [!!!!]Littorella[!!!!] [!!!!]
Since the illegible bit is also crossed out. But what you've done will amply suffice, since if we ever go back through in more detail then it would get picked up, and its pretty unlikely we'll be able to read the heavily obscured line, so it doesn't add much to any interpretation.

Glad you're enjoying it - I never met him, but have heard lots of people recounting his personality and it's wonderful to see that coming through in his notes. The charm of things like notebooks is you can really get into the way someones thought processes worked. There's plenty more on our digital library platform like this (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), the more famous ones like Newton and Darwin for instance, you suddenly get a very personal perspective, but there's plenty of less well known characters to explore as well, which is why we're trying to make collections such as Rackham's more discoverable through the transcription.

All the best for now,
Andy