Why proof?

If you have already started line-breaking for manuscripts T and Q, you will already have seen that there are often differences between the folio image and the transcription below.

Adding in the line breaks into the transcriptions of T and Q often highlights a mismatch between the transcription and the folio image. This is because the text in the bottom window is our base text for the project. We call it a base text because we are using it as a basis for the transcriptions of other manuscripts. Before we edit the base text, the Estoria team have removed all of the xml tags. This means the text for editing in the other manuscripts is called a bare text. As transcribers, we then edit this bare base text to make the transcription match the words we read in the manuscript image.

The 'E' manuscript is divided into two, and we call them E1 and E2. The other manuscripts of the Estoria, which all have letter names, such as Q, T, Ss and A (see our webpage for more information) are all more recent than E1, some by a few years and some by more than a hundred years. We call each manuscript a witness. There are various reasons why the witnesses are not all exact copies of each other, and that is one of the exact things we hope to study in the Estoria de Espanna project. 

Look at this example from manuscript Q:

Compare the folio image with the original bare text, and then with just the line break tags added afterwards:

You can see that there are differences between the text which appears in the folio image and the text in the transcription base text. 

A closer inspection of the two manuscripts of the text will reveal the extent of the changes. Purple highlights deletions; green shows changes in word-form and spelling changes; yellow highlights more significant changes to entire phrases:

In just these eight lines there are a host of changes between the two manuscripts. Broadly speaking, between E and later manuscripts, there are changes across most lines of text. At the proofing stage your job is to edit the base text so it matches what you read in the folio image, as closely as you can, but ignoring any abbreviations at this stage.