Bath Spa Student program

Created on 07/04/14 by JW

Purpose: To provide information for students on the Bath Spa Humanities at work program

Week 1

Background Knowledge

Read through the Introduction to the High Court of Admiralty as background to the HCA documents. This will explain what the documents are about what they look like and give you some examples of the writing you will be reading. These are legal documents and so legal language is used, there is also some repetition of phrases which you will learn to recognize

Tasks to complete for your ibook

1. Read though the introduction on the  Online Training Activities and some of the transcriptions for HCA 13/71.

2. To gain some background knowledge read through [1], write a brief summary.

3. Read the following page to find out about the calenders used at the time [2]

Read up on 17th century – who was in power? Religious ideas, What was going on in Europe?

SKYPE call to discuss progress with facilitator.

Week 2

Palaeographical skills

This week you will start to develop your palaeographical skills. At first the pages are likely to appear incomprehensible but with practice they will soon start to make sense. One tip, practice little and often is better than leaving long gaps between looking at pages.

Start by reading through the Online Training Activities Task 1 getting started have a go at some of the tasks. You could record your early transcriptions in your ibook, and compare to the model transcription. Are there any letters or phrases that your find more or less difficult? The tasks set for your ibook this week are to help you develop your vocabulary for the documents you will be reading, they often refer to parts of a ship and it is useful to have some idea of what they are.

Tasks to complete for your ibook

1. Label image details from [3]

2. Read Blog on nautical terms [4]

Week 3

Palaeographical skills

Now you have some background knowledge about the documents we would like you to concentrate on developing your transcription skills.

Aim to transcribe two pages this week which will be allocated to you by your facilitator. Although it would be best do the second after reading through the first page with your facilitator.

Whilst it is tempting to wait until you are sure of each word, you might get a better feel for the document if you read through the whole page transcribing those words you can and putting ?? in for the rest. By the time you get to the end you might find you can go back and fill in words you were unsure of first time round. Reading the transcription of the previous page or the following page if they have been done might also help give you a clue as to what the page is about.

Weeks 4 - 6

Palaeographical & Wiki skills

This week we will continue to work on your transcription skills by aiming to transcribe two pages, you also need to upload any completed pages from last week to the Wiki.
This may mean you will need to learn how to edit the wiki. Your facilitator can talk you through this but here are a few tips to help you.

Wiki Tips

At the top of each page there is an edit button, pressing this will enable you to start to edit a page. Once you have pressed it you will also see some Editing quick help at the bottom of the screen. If you are cutting and pasting your pages from word, it should be fairly straight forward, but you will need to put some things in bold by using the apostrophe key or highlighting the text and clicking on the B button at the top right hand side of the screen, you can preview your changes by pressing the preview button - when you are happy with the changes save the page. You can find more information about how to edit wiki pages and uploading your transcription on the wiki skills pages.

Remember to record evidence of transcriptions in your journal or ibook this could include screen shots of your transcriptions, along with any comments on things you found particularly difficult. Hopefully in a few weeks you will be able to look back and wonder at how much easier it is!!!

Weeks 7 + 8

Within any volume there may be four and five different people writing the pages, and it would be useful for you to be able to read a variety of hands.
Having mastered what we think of as the easy pages (yes really!!), now is a good time to hone your transcription skills. Here are some more tricky pages which we would like you to have a go at transcribing some different hands.
In addition to transcribing your two or three pages allocated by your facilitator, have ago at transcribing these pages. Your facilitator will be able to give you a model transcription to see how you have done.

Weeks 8 - 12

During the next few weeks in addition to your transcription we would like you to start doing some research on people or occupations mentioned in the HCA documents. The purpose of these is to help other people understand the documents and who these people were and what their lives were like. You need to research and produce 2 longer pieces of writing around the HCA documents. These could be;

a) A blog article - you might like to read some of the articles already written on our blog
      * An article based around a whaling case [[5]]
      * An article about Cannablism [[6]]
      * An article about using google maps [[7]]
      * An article by a previous transcriber [" http://marinelives-theshippingnews.org/blog/2012/09/25/hungry-work/2]

individuals and writing mini biographies that can be put on the wiki to help