Category Archives: Series: Transcription

Remember, remember the fifth of November

The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective transcribathon for 2019 is coming soon… November 5! Flex those fingers, boot up your computer, and get ready to join in, because this is no ordinary transcribathon.

Please join EMROC for our fifth annual international transcribathon as we transcribe an anonymous early modern medical recipe book (which includes recipes for whiskey and novel uses for oatmeal). It’s a super source, which Rebecca Laroche describes here. We will have transcription groups working in at least a dozen locations around the world, on three continents, with people coming and going virtually throughout the day.

The goal? To complete a transcription of a recipe book, making it easier for users to search than a digitised manuscript. This will eventually be available through the Folger Shakespeare’s Library catalogue alongside page images. Our other goal is to have fun with a community of people interested in transcribing and recipes, whatever their skill level.

We have lots of exciting activities planned to accompany our transcribing delights, which will run from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. GMT.

There will be:

  • subject hashtags on Twitter: #EMROCtranscribes, #feministOED, #materialhealthtech, #animalproducts, and more. (Details on the EMROC blog.)
  • a Zoom link (https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/706439992) all day to connect participants from around the globe.
  • and speakers!

Joining Zoom

Zoom is an easy-to-use platform that enables participants to ask the EMROC team questions throughout the day and to chat with other transcribers. You don’t need any special tools, either. Just click on our Zoom link, download the exe (if you don’t already have Zoom), and you’ll be in. There are details here on how to join, participate, and leave. We are hoping that the chat and Q&A functions on Zoom will make it easier for novice transcribers to get help quickly, as well as to bring the transcriber community together.

Speakers

The Department of History at the University of Essex is also hosting an EMROC panel on ‘Recipes in the Making’, which focuses on the manuscript we’re transcribing. Speakers include Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Sara Pennell (Greenwich), and Anne Stobart (Exeter).

The panel will be recorded, though it won’t be up immediately…

Survey?

We would love it if you filled in our pre-transcribathon survey, which will take no more than five minutes of your time. The survey will help us to learn more about our participants’ interests and backgrounds.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/7T9HKR5

If you want to join in or have other questions, please do let me know on Twitter (@historybeagle) or by email (lisa.smith@essex.ac.uk).

Thank you so much for your interest in our transcribathon and for filling in the survey. We would be so excited to transcribe with you on November 5.

An earlier version of this post appeared first at emroc.hypotheses.org.

Constructing authentic student textual authority: Teach a text you don’t know

By Christina Riehman-Murphy, Marissa Nicosia, and Heather Froehlich

Could a small recipe transcription project make space for student contributions to broader public knowledge? How could we facilitate our students situating themselves as part of a community of local undergraduate scholars and the larger international EMROC community?  Would they even see themselves as scholars?

These are the pedagogical questions that Marissa Nicosia, Heather Froehlich, and I pondered while collaborating on the second iteration of a three semester undergraduate research project on early modern recipes at a small local-serving public land-grant campus where students tend to have significant financial need and more than a third are first generation. With a 3:5 faculty student ratio, these questions felt particularly important. In a typical undergraduate English classroom, the faculty is an expert on the course’s primary texts as well as the wide context of scholarly conversations around those texts. It is unusual for undergraduate English courses (even advanced courses) offered at American universities to focus on unpublished material held in archives, museums, and libraries due in part to the liberal arts structure of college degrees.

Our text… It was typical to find remedies, recipes, and pest control advice side-by-side in early modern recipe books such as our course’s primary text, V.b.380. Image Credit: Folger Shakespeare Library.

In this project, faculty and students work together to investigate primary source materials. Creating authentic space for students to contribute their voices to those conversations in a meaningful way is a challenge. Funded through an undergraduate research initiative largely used by the sciences and social sciences, we had to adopt certain hands-on, practice-based laboratory experiences to students, most of whom have never interacted with rare, historical materials before – either in a physical or digital way. 

As this was not a typical classroom, we felt a bit more freedom to experiment. Experiences such as undergraduate research projects like ours, are arguably high-impact for both the faculty and students alike. For example, they create a space where faculty can explore pedagogical practices, such as student-led inquiry, renewable assignments, and open pedagogy, in order to create situated learning experiences and transformative outcomes.

We pulled back lectures so that inquiry could drive the discussions and encouraged students to share their evolving interests as they would determine subsequent semesters’ syllabi and their final research outputs. We gave each student a copy of They Say, I Say because of its emphasis on demystifying academic writing and helping students find their authentic voice. To help students begin to see themselves as scholars with accessible entry points for contributing to scholarly conversations we swapped journal articles for undergraduate-authored blog posts and taught textual analysis via Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes. We rebranded the library classroom space The LibLab to create an atmosphere of humanities experimentation.

Ultimately though, it was the choice to decentralize our authority as faculty by selecting an unfamiliar manuscript that had the greatest impact. The five students who joined the project in Spring 2019 were to transcribe V.b.380, a seventeenth-century digitized handwritten recipe manuscript from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s early modern recipe collection. Marissa had tested a recipe from the manuscript as part of her public history project, Heather has extensive experience in early modern digital humanities projects, and I teach undergraduate humanities majors how to research. But none of us had anything close to textual expertise for V.b.380.

The Penn State Abington undergraduate research students examine handwritten and printed early modern cookery and medicinal texts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Image Credit: Christina Riehman-Murphy.

In January, Marissa started the students on the project with a brief lesson on paleography and Dromio, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s transcription portal, and set them free to begin their semester long work of transcribing their assigned pages.  In the first few weeks the students’ questions about the recipes led the bi-weekly discussions and Marissa’s answers contextualized those recipes within early modern life and history. Questions like did she really catch and kill swallows (yes), did she actually test these remedies on her family (yes), and why is she using so much sugar paved the way for energetic and sometimes incredulous discussions on early modern medicine, ecofeminism, invisible labor, and the transatlantic triangle trade of enslaved labor which resulted in large quantities of unexpected ingredients in students’ recipe trancriptions.

The middle of the semester brought two new experiences. Heather introduced Voyant for linguistic analysis of their transcriptions and we visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. where we got to see V.b.380 on display in the First Chefs exhibit and were able to handle rare material manuscripts and meet with the exhibit curators and developers of the transcription portal. In both of those instances, the traditional authority dynamic was reversed when experts had genuine questions for the students. What verbs were most frequent in your transcriptions? What could be improved in the portal? What did you find interesting about V.b.380? What kind of notes are in the marginalia?

By joining this project they had become part of a relatively small group of undergraduate student scholars using Dromio and doing recipe transcription (e.g. see the EMROC project) and most importantly, they were developing authentic expertise on V.b.380. As Heather explicitly pointed out to them in her lesson, how often can faculty genuinely tell undergraduate students that they have unique expertise on a primary text?

V.b.380 was one of the family cookbooks on display in the First Chefs exhibit. Image Credit: Christina Riehman-Murphy.

By the end of the semester, we had learned a great deal about V.b.380 from the students and in this way the library classroom project site imitated the early modern kitchen. As historian Elaine Leong has argued, recipe books make visible the site of the early modern kitchen as a place of knowledge production. Student transcriptions of those recipe books make visible their own scholarly expertise and undergraduate research as a site of authentic knowledge production.


 

Christina Riehman-Murphy is a Reference and Instruction Librarian at Penn State Abington

Marissa Nicosia is an Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington

Heather Froehlich is the Literary Informatics Librarian at Penn State University Park

Recipe Books as Digital Feminist Archives

By Whitney Sperrazza, Rochester Institute of Technology

For sixteen weeks last fall, twelve University of Kansas students from a wide range of disciplines met at the Spencer Research Library to study, transcribe, and develop projects on one object from the library’s holdings: Elizabeth Dyke’s Booke of Recaits.[1]

I took this 232-page medicinal and culinary recipe book, dated 1668, as the foundation for a course on “Digital Feminist Archives” because this text, like all early women’s recipe books, has much to teach us about all three of these terms. In this post, I take my course’s title as a prompt to consider why recipe books are so useful for teaching at and about the intersections of archival, digital, and feminist practices.

Archives

Dyke’s Booke of Recaits contains over 700 recipes, many of which will sound familiar to Recipes Project readers.[2] You’ll find remedies for headaches, advice on using rose water to prevent the plague, and many, many recipes on preserving fruits. But, as we know, early women’s recipe books are so much more than historical recipe archives—and this manuscript is no different. Dyke’s Booke is a document of familial and social networks and a record of cultural practices.

“Elizabeth Dyke, her Booke of Recaits 1668.” Kenneth Spencer Research Library MS D157. Image Credit: Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.

On the manuscript’s opening page (above), several women catalogued their ownership of the book—Sarah Dyke, Dorothy Dyke, Elizabeth Dodsworth—suggesting that the text was passed down through the family’s female line. Like many surviving recipe books from the period, the titles of the recipes themselves also include names of women and men, either to note the original creator of the recipe (“Lady Rivers’ recipe for orange or lemon cakes”) or to mark the recipe’s effectiveness (“A very good green salve and ointment proved often times by goodwife Wesens”).

The networks preserved within this archival object not only became the basis for many classroom discussions, but also a model for the networks created and cultivated by our engagement with Dyke’s manuscript. The course attracted students from a variety of disciplines—English, History, Theater, Museum Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies—as if the recipe book had inherent interdisciplinary powers. The course structure also created space for collaboration and new networks between faculty, staff, and students that changed how students engaged with the “archive.” Our close work with Elspeth Healey, Spencer Research Librarian, and Whitney Baker, Spencer Conservationist, gave students the chance to experience first-hand the complex work of special collections librarians and archivists.

Digital

The Recipes Project, along with the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and Marissa Nicosia and Alyssa Connell’s Cooking in the Archives, provide excellent evidence of how recipe books can be incorporated into digital pedagogy. Drawing on teaching resources from all three projects, I structured “Digital Feminist Archives” as a workshop class. For the first eight weeks, students produced a collective transcription of Dyke’s manuscript and, for the second eight weeks, they designed and developed digital project prototypes focused on the manuscript.

I framed our hands-on work with Dyke’s manuscript with readings on feminist archival theory and feminist digital critique—readings that helped the students think humanistically and critically about the decisions we were making in our digital practice. This was the first “digital humanities” course for many of the students, but that field-specific term came up rarely in our classroom. Students were practicing the very best kind of digital humanities work without having to talk too much about it. Translating a physical archival object into a digital archive, the students gained digital skills while interrogating the digital translation process as part of that skill building.

“WebED.” Project Credit: Gwyn Bourlakov, Yee-Lum Mak, and Elissa Rondeau.

The students’ thoughtful critical thinking manifested in their final project prototypes, which included a study of Dyke’s medicinal recipes as a crowd-sourced ailments and remedies platform modeled on WebMD (above). Another group used MapHub to create a mapping tool that tracked the trajectories of Dyke’s main ingredients, allowing users to study the cultural and environmental impacts and influences of Dyke’s recipes (below).

“Mapping Elizabeth Dyke’s Recipes.” Project Credit: Brianna Blackwell, Mallory Harrell, and Kate Schroeder.

Feminist

The combination of early women’s recipe books and digital project development offers a chance to merge theory and practice in the classroom, a central tenet of both digital and feminist pedagogy.

Even more crucially, the embodied materiality of recipe books keeps the body at the center of digital training for students. Recipe books record the daily activities of women’s bodies. In a recipe for soft milk cheese, for example, Dyke explains that the cheese must be left to dry out in “very dry” grass, leaves, or nettles for 2-3 days, with the wrapping cloth changed daily. This description conjures women’s bodies moving through a garden with a pile of thin cloths, unwrapping and rewrapping blocks of soft cheese in the morning sun. Recipe books also prompt us to use our bodies actively as we read, whether by recreating culinary recipes (as some students in “Digital Feminist Archives” did) or by thinking about the various effects medicinal recipes could have on our bodies.

As we translated Dyke’s physical text into digital environments, the manuscript constantly reminded us to keep the body at the center of our decisions for transcription and project design. The students’ WebEd project started with a question about how bodies interact with digital spaces. What digital platform provides the most flexibility, multiple ways in depending on how that person thinks about their own body? The students’ cooking project started with questions about taste: will Dyke’s recipes taste the same now as they did in the late 17th century? how does taste transfer across time?

Culture and media scholar Kate Eichhorn defines the feminist archive as a “site and practice integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism.”[3] In “Digital Feminist Archives,” students debated the politics of access surrounding special collections libraries, studied the relationship between women’s household recipes and the histories of western medicine, and made new knowledge as they decided how best to translate Dyke’s manuscript into digital space.

In “Digital Feminist Archives,” Dyke’s recipe book invited the students and me into an interdisciplinary space of both theory and practice. What does your version of such a space look like and how have early women’s recipes helped you create it?

Notes

[1] A big thank you to the fabulous “Digital Feminist Archive” students: Brianna Blackwell, Gwyn Bourlakov, Mallory Harrell, Yee-Lum Mak, Jodi Moore, Sarah Polo, Elissa Rondeau, Kate Schroeder, Phoenix Schroeder, Suzanne Tanner, Rachel Trusty, and Chris Wright. And my sincerest gratitude to everyone at KU who worked hard to make this class possible and offered support for the students’ work at various stages: Elspeth Healey, Brian Rosenblum, Whitney Baker, Jocelyn Wehr, Erin Wolfe, Jonathan Lamb, and Scott Hanrath.

[2] The Spencer Research Library acquired the manuscript in 1977 from UK bookseller, Henry Bristow Ltd. While the manuscript has long been available for visitors to the Spencer, it is now available as part of the KU Libraries digital collections and as fully searchable text on the course website thanks to the hard work of the students listed above.

[3] Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order, 3.

2018 EMROC Transcribathon!

Today’s the day; Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is hosting their annual Transcribathon! This year, they’re working with a late-seventeenth-century cookbook by Jane Dawson, from the Folger Library.

Cookbook of Jane Dawson, late 17th century. Image courtesy of Folger Digital Image Collection
Cookbook of Jane Dawson, late 17th century. Image courtesy of Folger Digital Image Collection

 

We invite all Recipes Project readers to join us! For more information on today’s event, check out the following posts:

Transcribathon 2018 (EMROC)

Transcribathon 2018 Instructions and Glossaries (EMROC)

The Dawson Project (EMROC)

Liza Blake on Hosting a Transcribathon

Follow along with us Twitter at EMROC, Lisa Smith and the #EMROCtranscribes hashtag. See you there!