“Levels of Transcription” is an important disctinction between differing modes of examining a text. While some scholars might focus on “substantives” more than “accidentals” or vice versa , (substantives being the words in question while the accidentals are the parameters which form the “physicality” of the text), thorough textual investigation merits incorporating and analyzing both. Indeed, the levels of transcription can greatly affect how the text is read since the levels correspond to various degress of editorial influence. Because there are numerous ways to go about this process, my focus is turned more torwards the actual accidents and the potentialities for interpreation by the reader or editor.

There are several areas in which transcription can drastically alter the appearance and, therefore, meaning of a text. One such facet involves the physical nature of lettering. These “variant letterforms”, while obviously indicative of the evolution of text, present a problem to a transcriber. Whether merely connecting one letter to another or acting as an ornate serif, certain letter forms in older manuscripts bring about this conundrum of decryption. Additionally, there may also be various forms of a single letter, depending on context, time, location, or even the very author himself. This issue also occurs in the area of capitalization. Even though a name or proper title might not be characterized in the text, tradition may very well dictate that more recent conventions of capitalization should be utilized. We see the dilemma present in the contrast between lower case and upper case words. Modern writers engage in the same activity which the manuscript writers of antiquity engaged in, namely that of writing words in a lower case size but keeping the textual attributes of upper case lettering. Again, the degree of “normalization” poses the greatest challenge.

The aforementioned issues are not all inclusive, in addition to only pertaining to intraverbum aspects. Certain types of works or manuscripts conform to specific spatial conventions; for example, “works in verse will be divisible into cantos or fits, these into stanzas, the stanzas into lines, and so on.” However, “letters, for example--have their own structures.” Again, there is a fissure in transcriptive methods: should the transcriber be faithful to the physical material before him/her or should the transcriber rely on the story written on the material. It is also fairly common for editors or transcirbers to come across obvious or blantant errors in the text and try to fix them accordingly, perhaps to allow for maximum readability. Often times, the punctuation fixes are placed in brackets while corrections of misspellings are identified by means of an asterisk (the initial spelling is recorded elsewhere in the text). And finally, because writers in older times used abbreviations just like we do, some transcribers take it upon themselves to expand the shortened forms in the text so that we may have a more “complete” reading of the text.

A transcriber has many tools for assisting readers or other editors in the transcription process, the most helpful of which are tags. Electronic texts, obviously, are far easier to work with in terms of the markup process. Some of the most common tags are used in a widespread manner and work to accurately render the structure and layout of the text. A category of tags called “empty tags” aim to preserve this scaffolding, and they include end tags which delineate line, column, and page boundaries. Because XML is a very case sensitive language, please be sure to maintain consistent capitalization in abbreviations, elements, and attributes. For almost every action that can be performed unto a text, there is an associated tag which illustrates and codes this very action.