For this week’s post, I was excited to dive into the “database” (scared to use that term without scare quotes, yawl) of letters and diaries within the University of Iowa’s DIY History project. The transcription process, especially of handwritten documents or interviews that evoke a sense of the document’s idiosyncrasies, I think, is important work. For the most part, I felt that contributing to this project was straightforward, aside from illegible diary entries here and there. However, when I came across someone’s (anonymous) notes from a 1982 conference, “Women Against Racism”, I was flummoxed as to how to convey the documents’ personalities. The image above depicts the most pronounced example of this issue, with most of the page containing doodles that make the notes feel more like somebody’s private notes than an all-text document. Not wanting to disregard it completely, I ended up transcribing this drawing as “cartoon face drawn in center of page”. But still, I felt that my intervention here was taking away from the document’s character. This issue, for me, is a reminder that (though the digital is material) the process of digitizing something like these notes carries with it the peril of reducing a text’s original layers.
