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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 729.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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Date: 2020-04-04 11:27:45+00:00
From: Francois Lachance
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.715: learning to read handwritten documents
Dear Willard and Michael,
I am wondering the gamification of paleography
[quote]
> A participant in MEDTEXTL list, Professor Peter Baker (English,
> Virginia), has described an intriguing approach to the teaching of
> palaeography, particularly in the case of the Secretary hand:
[/quote]
It's an approach I am assuming it is part of a more complete
pedagogical toolkit.
I wonder what other components would come together to create a holistic learning
environment.
I am assuming a combination of techniques are necessary.
Intrigued
F
Francois Lachance
Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
https://berneval.hcommons.org
to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied tasks
> On Apr 1, 2020, at 3:54 AM, Humanist wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 715.
> Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
> Hosted by King's Digital Lab
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
> [1] From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten
documents (78)
>
> [2] From: Emily Smith
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten
documents (62)
>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2020-04-01 07:48:24+00:00
> From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.712: learning to read handwritten documents
>
>> On 31,Mar2020, at 1:02 AM, Humanist wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> ... design
>> a digital font approximating the hand without any compromises to modern
>> expectations (as he has done), then giving it to the students so that
>> they can decipher a text in it that they themselves have entered. I
>> assume the approach works best when the students copy from a modern
>> transcription of a manuscript they are trying to read.
>
> Why?
>
> You surprise me. If as you suggest the point is to learn to read the
> hand, then will not any words or strings of characters chosen by the
> learner serve as well, as long as the learner knows what words and
> characters they are?
>
> In general, I assume the approach will work best when the learner
> chooses the words or letters to look at in the new font.
> (I also assume that restricting oneâs attention to manuscripts for which
> modern transcriptions already exist would be an effective way of sapping
> the studentsâ desire to learn to read the hand in question in the first
> place. But maybe thatâs just me. If there were modern transcriptions
> of the documents used in the paleography classes I took in school â I
> have no reason to assume there were, or werenât â my instructors took
> good care that we should not know where to find them.)
>
>> How well would this method work for manuscript hands across the board?
>
> To state the obvious (since if you donât, maybe someone should), itâs
> going to work best for hands (or fonts â students raised on Century
> Schoolbook or Helvetica often report dismay when confronting black
> letter, and this technique might be helpful in that case, too) in which
> the letters have mostly consistent forms, and there are not too many
> ligatures that reshape their constituent letters into what a novice
> reader may regard as quite different and unrelated shapes. Digital
> fonts can indeed deal with ligatures and variant forms, but I would
> expect that it might involve more work than the instructor will relish,
> to actually use those features in rendering the student-entered
> document. I may be wrong; does everyone else already know that web
> browsers and word processors, and (La)TeX, already use variant letter
> forms and ligatures without any work at all beyond selecting the font?
> The last time I looked, it looked a lot harder than that.)
>
> Of course, knowing the non-ligatured forms of letters is helpful and may
> give the learner enough information to be able to deal with ligatures and
> variant forms.
>
>> Under what circumstances would it fail to reproduce the manuscript in
>> question?
>
> All of them.
>
> How could it not? Anyone who expects that using a manuscript-inspired font
> will reproduce the manuscript which inspired it has evidently not looked
> carefully at the manuscript (or possibly has not looked carefully at
> documents using the font). It would surprise me if Peter Baker has any
> such expectation.
>
> Anyone who wants a facsimile reproduction needs a camera, not a font.
>
>> What would the failures reveal?
>
> That human hands wielding quills do not produce the same results as
> movable type or its digital equivalent (and vice versa).
>
> To whom can any of this be news?
>
>
> ********************************************
> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Black Mesa Technologies LLC
> cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com
> http://www.blackmesatech.com
[...]
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/ ) and Humanist
> (www.dhhumanist.org )
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