Lacking Historical Context

After several hours I finally completed my first transcription, finding it easier than I had supposed it would be.  The only real difficulty came from the Latin in the titles, as well as the names of authors who were often French, German, Dutch, American and English, making spelling difficult at times. However, I was able to overcome it.
I'll be starting on the transcriptions of the history section of the catalog very soon. The reason for this is because while I was making my catalog of the catalog, I discovered that most of the History section is missing any kind of title to describe the exact section and what it contains. For instance, most areas would have a numbered section, then a chapter, and sometimes an article, in order to organize which books were listed where. The history portion of the catalog stops doing this a short way through for some strange reason, meaning that I will have to read over the pages and try to extrapolate what all of the books have in common that would cause them to be grouped together. Hopefully this'll be easier said than done.
Unfortunately, I have no pictures this time to give examples of what I'm saying. They'll be up on my next post.

G & I

This week I spent most of my time attempting to both read and catalog the content of each page of the Catalog(insert Inception joke), which would swing back in forth from easy to quite difficult. The actual writing within the catalog is usually pretty legible. However, my first roadblock appeared in the form of the capital letter "I", which in the Catalog takes two different forms.

The word on the right side "Infidelity" uses a very different style than the word "Idem" which appears on the left side in the word that appears to be Golem at first glance. This exemplifies an issue that I didn't consider when I began to read the pages, namely, that the writing is going to be from multiple people with different styles of writing. This is true in the way that a capital "A" is written in the catalog because in most of the script it looks perfectly fine, however, in the headings, it's closer in appearance to "oc" than it is to an "a". But with this knowledge, hopefully the reading won't be as hard as hard as it was previously. Idem also made this more difficult because it was a word I had never heard of before this. It apparently means to signify the same author or title as previously before it. Vocab lesson for anyone who didn't know that.

Slowly I have my own catalog of the catalog gaining meat, and it is almost completed. Thankfully, going through and doing this process has allowed me to get all of the pages into their proper place without the pictures, because until recently I had a group of 10 pages that had been stuck between sections, but it was only during my research that they were the entire section on Meditations and Morals. Soon, I will begin rephotographing and then the actual process of building a digital archive can begin.

Beginning work

I decided to merge my first two weeks together since there wasn't much to be done my first week. I began the semester by looking through the pictures of the archives catalog that had already been taken. I made my first attempt at actually reading the text through the pictures, but I found it surprisingly difficult due to the handwriting being in cursive and the pictures being seen off a bright computer screen. In person, the writing was much easier to decipher. I ended up discovering only three of the pictures that were in any real need of being redone. Two of these pictures were a bit blurry, which can be easily fixed, but one had very faint ink on the bottom half, which may be significantly more difficult to deal with, though I wouldn't know the exact process. What I did start to notice was that there seemed to be too few pictures for how large the catalog itself was. When I pointed this out, I was sent to search through the catalog itself for what pages were missing.

This big guy is the catalog for the archives. It did not take me long to realize that the only way to figure out which pages had their pictures finished and which didn't would mean going through this giant page by page and seeing which pictures were in the gallery I had and which weren't.



















The pages of the catalog were thick but pretty delicate. The cover itself was covered in red rot and falling apart, so I had to be careful to not damage it. The book itself is roughly 600 pages long, though much of it is empty; left so intentionally so that more could be added to it later. I put the gallery of pictures I already had on my computer into order and went page by page in order to see what was missing. The first couple of missing pictures I found were separated from by a few blank pages, which helped to explain why they had been missed. However, I found that many pages that were missing pictures were on the same opening as ones that had been photographed. I'm hoping this means that there are pictures that have somehow escaped, otherwise I'll have about 20 or so pages to photograph and rephotograph.

Also, I found these papers that were tucked away in the folds of the book. They're the pages from the old Jesuit catalog from way back. They hadn't been photographed like the others, but I think they should be added in. No one likes to feel left out.