Speaker
Description
The rise of automated/handwritten text recognition has revived an old discussion that had seemed otherwise dormant: How should historical texts be transcribed? The main tension is between two approaches: the first calls for true-to-character transcriptions, while the second purposefully modifies the text, following long-established philological traditions. There are many confusing names used for these approaches: facsimile transcription, transliteration, graphemic transcription, variously prefixed diplomatic transcriptions (hyperdiplomatic, semidiplomatic), as well as interpretative or normalized transcriptions. The first part of the paper will attempt to provide an overview of them.
The main focus of the presentation, however, will be on the essence of these approaches and the justification they use in dealing with the most contentious issue: the expansion of Latin abbreviations. The arguments for the true-to-character approach focus on the effectiveness of AI training and a clear division of tasks, where the expansion is left for further processing. This promises transparency of the results. On the other hand, philological traditions have purposely moved away from true-to-character transcriptions in their evolution, preferring to devote expertise to expanding abbreviations in order to create readable texts.
I will leave aside the technological advantages of both approaches—noting only that both can achieve good results—and I will focus on methodological issues. I will contextualize both approaches not only from the current perspective but also from historical ones, and I will question whether they should really be seen as two opposites: one supposedly transparent and devoid of interpretation, and the other interpretative.