Elon's Machyn Diary Work Log

Began extracting the relevant pages from Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials both vols. II and III and his Annals of the Reformation to use in enhancing our transcript of Machyn's diary. The microfilm call numbers and publication data of these volumes follows:

GLMR FILM x1493 Reel 3927 Ecclesiastical Memorials, v.II

a 1733 reprint by Osborn, Davis, Austen, and Millar of Wyat's 1721 (first?) edition

GLMR FILM x1493 Reel 3928 Ecclesiastical Memorials, v.III

(same edition as v.II)

GLMR FILM x1493 Reel 3151 Annals of the Reformation

printed by Tho. Edlin 1725, claiming to be the 2nd edition "with large additions both in
the history and appendix." (NOTE: I checked the 3rd edition, too, but it did not seem to
differ from this second edition.)

Strype's primary sources (besides the Machyn Diary) include correspondence between important people, church records, published sermons, parliamentary records, and other manuscripts of various diaries and journals - usually of nobility.

I found an overlap in Strype's works between Memorials, v.III and Annals covering the death of Queen Mary and the ascension of Elizabeth to the throne. In this overlap, Memorials usually seems to have text that is closer to Machyn's language. I believe that this indicates that he used Machyn's MS extensively for the account of Mary's death in Memorials but then used Memorials itself for much of the introductory material that relates to Mary in Annals. This theory would not hold, however, if the first edition of Annals preceded that of Memorials which I have not yet determined.

Today I also have begun labelling each entry in the transcript of the diary with a numerical date with the format: Month/Day/Year.

Finished Stype reference correlation and handwritten date labelling. A conclusion: only a couple of the pencil marked "citations" on the MS are accurate relative to the editions of Strype I am working with. However, all but a couple of these citations, (and there are several hundred) do refer to a passage in Strype - and they seem to always correlate with enhancements Nichols made to the MS in his volume (which I have been using to aid in the correlation). Occasionally, I believe I've been able to improve on Nichols' work and find more material in Strype's books than even he did, but only occasionally. In an effort to be more conservative with enhancements and more linguistically true to the original than Nichols, we may not want to alter our transcript with anything but the enhancements and we may want to set them apart linguistically by using Strype's spelling conventions. (Or at least as much as possible, for we may be able to restore partial words that were damaged in the fire.)

Identified many of the formatting problems with the Word files that caused the SGML conversion problems. They are mostly related to the variation in the way superscripts and other font styles are formatted in the Word file. So that Brian's converter could be programmed properly, I located the exact positions in the Word file where the style format changes.

I began, also, labelling the diary entries in an older version of the sgml file with dates in the format:

[DIV1 TYPE="entry" DATE="YYYY-MM-DD"]DIARY TEXT[/DIV]

Debated about F4r date because of Nichols. 8/20 or 8/30? Decided 8/30, as was originally in transcript.

Decided to agree with Nichols and Strype on F33v, line 23 date. Our transcript has June 19, and I believe it should be June 9. Consult smudge on original image.

Beginning to add enhancements into the fully dated SGML file. (Except for F162v which for some reason didn't make it into the working file - Brian is going to try to work on getting that settled tonight). The first entry that has an enhancement is May 3, 1551 from Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, Vol.II. These are the tags I'm using to add the enhancements:

    [seg attrib="book.chapter.page"]TEXT[/seg]

The three books will be abreviated as follows:

• Ecclesiastical Memorials, v.II=EM2
• Ecclesiastical Memorials, v.II=EM3
• Annals of the Reformation=Ann

For ease of string searching I will represent the book title with 3 characters (as above), the chapter number with 2 characters, and the page number with 3 characters. In both the chapter and page numbers, blank 10s or 100s places will be filled with a single character space.

e.g. May 3^rd's entry will be:

     [seg attrib="EM2. 4.272"]xxxxx[/seg]

(Note: the [seg] tag set is placed not just at the beginning of each entry, but at the beginning of
EVERY single enhancement.)

Actually, after consulting my more detailed notes - I found two references in Srype earlier than 5/3/1551, the first entry in the diary (8/4/1550) and the third (9/1/1550). But since some "enhancements" have already been added to the principle text in the first 10 pages I just put a single [seg] tag set at the beginning of those entries until the appropriate treatment of these enhancements, taken mostly from Nichols, can be decided by our group.

Unclear for the moment as to whether I should replace the previous enhancement work in the first 10 pages with my own, or whenther I should leave it be and cite the appropriate references to Strype, or whether I should attempt (like the first recontructor) to use material from Nichols to fill in the blanks, I left most of F1r-F4v as is in the SGML file converted from Word. F5r and F5v present pages where the first real creative work on my part has taken place: (the continuation of 10/16/1551 and 12/7/1551).

Wish to note to reader that I do not have a log entry for every single day I work on project, only days when significant decisions are made, tasks are begun or completed, or questions need to be noted. For specific hours worked, feel free to email me.

An observation: it seems like Nichols' adaptations might be useful for our purposes after all. For example, observe F6v, 1/4/1552, in transcript and the same date on page 13 of Nichols's text. Either he guesses and/or makes up a lot of the partial word completions, or he had access to more of each partial word than we do. In the first two lines of the entry, we have

	"#he iiij day of januarij wa6 mad a grett sk#"
	"# hard by ye crosse a gaynst ye kyng lord of myss#"

	"  The iiij day of Januarii was mad a grett skaffold [in Ch]epe"
	"hard by the crosse, agaynst the kynges lord of myss[rule] cumyng..."

	"[T]he iiij day of januarij wa6 mad a grett sk[affold]"
	"[in Chepe] hard by ye crosse a gaynst ye kyng lord of myss[rule]"
	"[cu]myng..."

A curious comment:
We use the '#' sign to indicate a gap in the text, a portion of the text that can't be discerned, or simply where the line is burned off. This is fine, except that it in some cases where the '#' is used, the folio page is singed (usually on the left margin) at the location of the line but without damaging the text. This might be a little misleading in some cases, but for now I'm leaving every '#' be.

Okay, per our meeting today, I've resolved to check the '#' signs wherever they occur so as to limit their usage to representing missing/omitted text only.
**IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT**
Also, we have now resolved a compromise between reporting the manuscript as accurately as possible and making it readable. We will use attributed [seg] tag sets (see above) for enhancements that have direct references to Strype, and non-attributed [seg] tag sets for any other enhancement we make to the MS (from Nichols or our own creativity). This will enable ALL enhancements to be enclosed by [seg] tags, and eventually will allow us to develop an interface that will enable the information contained therein to be toggled on and off in the display. (Issues that will have to be resolved at that stage of the project include how to display the citation embedded in the attributed [seg] tag and how to, or whether to, stylistically differentiate between the Strype-sourced and Other-sourced enhancements. For the moment, I am enclosing all enhancements not taken from Strype in square brackets within the [seg] tag set and no extra affect for Strype-referenced text.) Brian is looking into a quick way to convert small groups of the SGML entries into a non-indexed HTML format so that we may view small portions of the edited/enhanced entries at our convenience. It will probably be a small and simple two-page script - one with the enhancements and one without. Expect details later this week or beginning of next.

I've also resolved to keep a list of possible character interpretation discrepancies that I find between the transcript, the images, Strype, and Nichols. This will hopefully be periodically verified by Collette, and may also take an online form.

SIDE NOTE There is also a potential paper/article on the use of editing techniques to skew the semantics of historical events to make the events seem more dramatic - a sensationalization, if you will. Observe Machyn, F7r, 01/22/1552, and compare with it's correlated reference in Strype EM2.8.307-308. In this example, note how Strype has reordered the events that Machyn reports to create a scene of chaos that resolves itself in a moralistic, "and this reaffirmed their faith" sort of way. Kind of sneaky, eh?

Between typing enhancement passages today, I poked around Google for references to Machyn. Here's an interesting foreign site (Norweigian I think) that includes an excerpt from the Diary. I wonder if we might be able to adapt their system of HTML "notes" for our purposes.

I just want to note that if we want to change the style of the "non-attributed" enhancements any time in the future, it should not be difficult since they will at least all be in the consistent <seg>[text]</seg> form. A simple search and replace function in any text editor should be able to alter the style or presence of the square bracket and add any font-change or italics tags if desired.

Found a character change I made earlier last week before resolving to consult CVM and RWB about them:

        F6r, end of Line 24 -- "in" instead of "iij."

        F6v, end of line 19 -- "m#" instead of "b#"

Advise verification of:

last word fragment in F7v, line 8: "cent#" or "cont#"(as is)? 

F7v, line 10: "gren" (as in the color) or "quen"(as is)? 

F8r, line 12: "Sun" (a title, perhaps of a tavern) or "sam"(as is)?

F8r, line 17: ser "vmf[frey]"(Nichols) or "vmp[frey]"(as is - see white blotch near rt. marg. on img.)?

F8r, line 25: last fragment "wa" might be "wo" for woman.

F8v, line 5: "in," "un"(Nichols), or "iiij"(as is).

Beginning to delete the "penciled-in" Strype references that heretofore have been in square brackets after each entry that Nichols(?) found to correspond to passages in Strype's volumes. Also, beginning at F9r, I'm beginning to pay much closer attention to the placement of the '#' sign at the end and beginning of lines, making sure that wherever there is a '#' there is text missing, and that it does not denote a place where just the margin has been singed off. Unfortunately, this marking only takes into account the body text of the diary. If marginal notes have been singed off next to complete entries and they weren't picked up even in part by the original transcribers and placed in right-aligned columns (which also have yet to be fully developed in our mark-up), their content and even their hypothetical locations will probably be lost in the interest of focusing on the most accurate possible presentation of the body text.

Discussed with office staff a little about the possibility of writing an article for either a newspaper or a digital-publication journal about my work on this project. They seemed to think that Ann Arbor News might be interested in doing a story on this restoration project at some point (publicity perhaps that might be able to attract the attention of important people?). And also that my experience might be a valuable thing to report to a journal that serves as a forum for people to discuss techniques, problems, and other issues related to the digital publication process. It is interesting that one of the staff members brought it up after asking me to describe my project, in a context very similar to the way RWB suggested I do the same at our last meeting. Mental Note: pursue this matter; inquire to Brian about these journals when he gets back from CO and ask RWB if he'd be interested in co-writing a letter to the AAN to propose an article about our project.

A couple more character checks:

  Folio 11r, line 20: 'm'(for master) or 'in'(as is)?
  Folio 11v, last char. of line 8: 's' or 'r'(as is)?
  Folio 11v, first word of line 11: 'ssam' or  'ssun'(as is)?
  Folio 12r, first word-frag, line 3: 'ffet'(forfeit) or 'ssett'(as is)?
  Folio 12v, last letter, line 10: 'm' or 'n' (as is)?

Important character check:

  Folio 14r, line 24, date: 'xxiij' or 'xxij'(as is) - I think it is the former and that the first downstroke of the first 'i' is just a little faded.

More checking advised:

  Folio 14v, line 15: 'ther'(as is) or 'they'(my recommendation)?
  Folio 14v, line 23: 'brode'(as is) or 'brade'(recommended, see char. 'a' above in line 22)?
  Folio 15r, line 6: 'draw'(as is) or 'dran'(k)?
  Folio 15r, line 18 end of line: 'gehy[ng]'(as is) or 'gohy[ng]'(recommendation - believe that 'e' in transcript represents an unclosed 'o')?

need interpretation of characters by context:

  Folio 19v, line 9: 'iij'(as is) or 'in'(recommended)?
  Folio 20r, line 11, last character: 'j'(as is) or 'g'(recommended, but disputable)?

ATTENTION: Found gap in transcript on Folio 20r. Between transcript lines 6 and 7 is a whole other two line entry dated August 6,1553. The entry presently dated August 6 is actually August 8. Making addition, would like to have double checked for accuracy.

  Folio 21r, end of line 8: 'winche'(ster) or 'wincho'(as is)?
  Folio 21v, top of page: took liberty of changing jumble of letters after 'thomas' to corresponding characters in his last name as found in Strype: pal*m*e*r.
  Folio 22r, first line (damaged): "#an" could be "sam" - 'a' is broken, but count feet of 'n/m'.
  Folio 23v, line 7, first word frag: 'aft'(as is) or 'ast'(recommended)?
  Folio 23v, line 9, last word frag: 'lar'(as is) or 'lau'(recommended by context)?

  Folio 26v, beginning of line 5: "efett"(recommended) or "esett"(as is)?
  Folio 28v, end of line 26: "susse"(as is) or "suffe"(recommended)?

  Folio 33v, first word frag: "ut"(recommended) or "nt"(as is)?

  Folio 41v, line 14:  "a crest"  may be "a Croft" (see Nichols and Strype) - refers to specific fellow that might be able to be cross referenced historically.

Recommend Folio 60r, line 13, first word be changed from "yr" to "&."
Recommend Folio 61v, line 10 last word frag be changed from "ffuy..." to "psny" for gloss= spinice, pinnace.
Recommend Folio 61v, line 14 first word: "uelvett" instead of "helmett" ?
HAD TO ADD A MISSED ENTRY INTO THE TRANSCRIPTION - ADVISE PROOFREAD: FOLIO 62R, 11/21/56 (FIRST of THREE of that Date)

Recommend Folio 66r, line 10 last word frag: "su" change to "sn" for the word 'snake' on the emblem.
Recommend Folio 68r, line 1, second word: "ffguld" change to "shuld."
Recommend Folio 69v, line 18, first word: "chamber" change to "Chomley" (it seems like the context calls for a surname, and the 'r' might be a 'y,' the 'b' might be an 'l').

I just wanted to take a second to note some concerns that I have with the transcript as a whole. Many characters on each page (between 6-12 usually) are transcribed from the manuscript incorrectly. It is possible to discern their correctness by observing the content of the passages in which questionable characters are found. It is true that Machyn's system of spelling is very irregular - but generally the problem with the transcription is that similar looking figures on the MS are mistaken for each other. Just a couple general examples: lower case 'm or n' for 'in,' or final 's'(6) for superscript 'e.' A specific example: Folio 67v, line 8, first word - transcript says 'penoij,' but the context describes a funeral procession for Sir Oliver Leader in which parade a herald of arms, a standard of arms, and a penoij_ of ames, a coat of armur...etc, the standard detail that Machyn has repeated by this point in his diary possibly 300-400 times. It is obvious from the pattern that Machyn follows in his descriptions to know that the final character in the word in question "should be" an 'n' in Machyn's handwriting. We can then examine the MS image itself and see that the confusion was possibly caused because the long tail of the 'r' at the end of Oliver's name in the previous line intersects the flow of the second curve of the final letter in question. Additional confusion is caused because most other final 'n's on this page of the MS do not have "tails." However, 'n's CAN have tails in Machyn's handwriting, as noted by most occurances of the word 'in,' for example. By the detail of previous entries, we know that it 'ought' to be an 'n,' and by examination of the MS we find that there is no extra mark or separation except for the above 'r' that break the two curves of the letter apart. Even though it might be a slightly irregular shape, I see no reason to report that this letter is 'ij' instead of 'n.'

Many of the incorrectly interpreted characters are part of damaged fragments of words that make it very difficult to be 100% accurate without a very BIG-screen and HIGH magnification like I am using at the Scholary Publishing Office. I am editing as I go as much as possible, but there are so many alterations that need to be made that I am not documenting every single one. The ones that I am certain need changing because their letters in the current transcription create a nonsensical or incomprehensible word w.r.t. the context, I do change - assuming that the accurate characters are immediately apparent. Many of these are very very obvious and do not even require a personal judgement call, because I very closely examine the MS images. I am quite surprised, sometimes, considering that the transcript was proofread before coming into my hands, that some of these errors were not corrected - then again I do not know if the proofreaders had to compare the MS and transcript so closely as I have had to for the line-by-line text enhancement. I hope that these changes I am making in the transcript will be accepted for their intention: making the transcript as linguistically, orthographically, and historically accurate as possible. Know that whenever I have even a shadow of a doubt as to the actual nature of the characters in the MS I post the questions with my recommendations on this page, without changing the transcript. Seeing as we do have an unaltered Word file in Prof. Bailey's AFS space, still, of the transcript my changes will not be hard to find if they need to be located. Nor, I feel, will it be hard to discern my reasons for making the changes if my current preview pages are compared to both the old Word file and the MS pages. It might be a good idea, in fact, to give the whole thing another proofread comparing the preview pages to the MS images at high magnification. Even though I am noticing a lot of changes that need to be made, I feel that there may be other ones that I am NOT noticing that are NOT in the areas of the text where I am working.

In case a "meta-textual" moment is needed for reference in Strype that acknowledges the Machyn Manuscript, check out EM3.60.449, August 12, 1558. Also observe Ann.11.134 and Ann.11.141 and Ann.15.190.

		Substantive change needed? Folio 90v, line 21.  "v" penons instead of "x" penons?
									   Folio 90v, line 29.  "man" instead of "nun"?

Began enhancing F94v, which is the first of 6 pages with overlapping citations in both EM3 and Ann. I will be citing the most comprehensive and complete of the two sources mostly, unless it is obvious that Strype used different lines in Machyn's entries for the different volumes. Also here it would be good to note another abreviation I am using. Since the first 40 or so pages of Ann are in a three-section Introduction that precedes the first chapter, I will refer to their chapter numbers as either I1, I2, or I3 - corresponding with the section number in the Introduction.

On F102r, Machyn describes the "new" funerary practices under the "new" church of England. Strype on Ann.15.190 makes comparisons with Catholicism.

A telling of the story of Robin Hood: F106r

After a 6 1/2 week hiatus I am back at work and I've encountered an interesting discrepancy between our transcript and Nichols that I would like to log. On F114r, first entry (10/23/1559), first line our transcript begins to record the word "alther..." to represent Machyn's usual spelling of alderman. However, Nichols transcribes it as "archedecon." Examining the MS under the highest magnification possible of our image, I'm inclined to agree with Nichols, however the glue from the Library's paper frame obscures the word very badly. The entry's subject matter is of a deposition of M Harpfield (who is either archdeacon or alderman), at which is either attended by or included in the deposition other members of the church including "dyvers prebendarys" and (as Nichols transcribes) vicars. It would seem, by my reasoning, that if so many of the men who have a financial and ceremonial interest in the church are present, that the deposition be of a church official rather than a municipal official. Hence, I am going to use "archdeacon" in the electronic text, but I will place it within Seg tags to show that it is primarily an editorial decision.

Also, while I'm recording new stuff that I'm up to, I'll make a note here that I have changed the home directory of our project from my personal AFS space on the UMICH network to the new Machyn Group directory procured by Dr. Bailey. Copies of all our pertinent information is now available to our members at our Home Directory: ~machyn. To access this space from your personal UNIX logon directory, simply type: cd ~machyn . Web pages for the project will also now be served off of http://www.umich.edu/~machyn/ , including the Preview Page: http://www.umich.edu/~machyn/machynpreview.html , the Demo Page: http://www.umich.edu/~machyn/demo.html , and this log of my own contributions and questions about the project: http://www.umich.edu/~machyn/elonlog.html

the word 'ffoyne' in the entry for December 19, 1559, correlates very well with the OED 'foin, n.²'

Today I hereby announce the completion of my extended summer's work on the Machyn Diary. Quick Recap: I prepared print-outs of relevent pages from three volumes of John Strype's work from microfilm, correlating his text with entries in the University of Michigan transcript of Henry Machyn's manuscript diary. After converting the transcript to SGML and streamlining its entry dating system, I used the text and content from Strype and attempted to restore the damaged areas of the diary MS while isolating my restorations from the MS text with clearly attributed SGML tags. For damaged areas of the text that could not be restored with information from Strype, I attempted to draw on the previous print version of the diary by John G. Nichols and my sense of the diarist's orthography language patterns, with the help of Collette Moore's and Professor Bailey's review. These additions are both "unattributed" and isolated from the MS and Strype correlations with unattributed SGML tags. On top of work within the diary, I created a Demonstration webpage for the pre-published project to aid in its early review process. For our internal editorial process, I have been maintaining my "MachynPreview" webpage to post rough versions of my electronic work on the diary, page per folio page, and I have been maintaining this web log.

Now that I am finished, I am uploading the finished SGML file in two identical copies to the Machyn Group home directory on the UMICH servers and I am sending copies to Brian R. in the Scholarly Publishing Office. The file name is machyn-new.sgml and I have included a backup named machyn-new-backup.sgml. Perhaps for purely archival purposes, perhaps for vanity, I have also included two more identical copies entitled respectively: machyn-elons-add.sgml and machyn-elons-add-backup.sgml. These are completely identical to the others, and are just backed up backups for the updated SGML files. I really want to insure this stuff! I'm even keeping copies here at home in case anything happens to the directory space the group has. :)

Anyway, I've enjoyed working on this project and I look forward very much to seeing it come to completion in the near future. All the best!

-Elon Lang.