::chirography and transcription::
In an essay entitled "Discovering Walt Whitman," novelist, artist, and poet Clarence Major as an act of inspiration quotes Whitman's thoughts about language: "Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something rising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its basis broad and low, close to the ground" (30). And perhaps no other act can come closer to the ground in Whitman studies and scholarship than dealing with manuscripts written by the author.
As a new staff member in the Whitman archive, I remember feeling awed and slightly humbled at the idea that the images I was viewing so closely and was being charged to transcribe had been produced by the mythological Walt Whitman. The idea struck me starry-eyed that he had held those scraps of paper in his hands and that the words scrawled across the page were the result of the impression made from the strange otherworldly connections that make thoughts into words through the compression of pencil or ink against the page. And so doing my job, transcribing and encoding these documents accurately for potentially thousands of other eyes to rely on, became even more than important.
But upon attempting these first stabs into not only encoding the document to be displayed within the digital archive but also transcribing the text of the manuscripts, I discovered an incredibly frustrating set of problems. My knowledge of Whitman's poetry was almost completely non-existent, and I constantly had trouble deciphering his handwriting. I knew that there were resources-people to ask, other manuscript transcriptions to scan for examples-but I wanted to be able to figure out these problems on my own as often as possible, and I wanted to be able to do that as quickly as possible.
In response to my own needs as an encoder and transcriber of manuscripts, I've created this handwriting guide to provide examples of the ways in which Whitman forms certain letters and in specific contexts. It is my hope that this resource will serve as a tool for other encoders as well.
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Major, Clarence. Necessary Distance: essays and criticism. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2001.
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