button to main menu   Ford's Description of the Lakes 1839/1843


Transcription

This transcription, and notes, are from A Description of Scenery of the Lake District, by William Ford, published by Charles Thurnham, Carlisle, Cumberland and R Groombridge, Paternoster Row, London, 3rd edn 1843. The copy used is in a private collection.
source type: Ford 1839 (3rd edn 1843)

Transcription

Deciding how to arrange a transcription in 'records' which are destined to become html pages is not easy. The transcript here is made page by page, ignoring the problem that a sentence might be split across page breaks; excepting footnotes, which may go on from page to page, and which are gathered together on the page on which they start. The original markers for footnotes are star or asterisk, section sign, etc, which are replaced in the transcript by a serial number within each page.
Somewhen, the text, at present in MODES records, will migrate to xml. At this change the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) should be considered, though at first sight that methodology seems very biased towards academic study of 'Literature' rather than everyday text. TEI would mark up the whole of the text as one document, the particular arrangement into pages for an edition treated as a subsidiary feature. Here the book is regarded as a specific object being recorded and pagination is maintained.
Some features of the exact typesetting has been ignored. Italics are recognised; hyphenation across lines has been removed, judging as well as I am able to retain the hyphen where it likely belongs. A word split across pages is left that way, but the beginning part of the word is added as inferred data to its continuation on the following page.
Peculiarities of spelling and grammar are preserved, some are perhaps just typesetter's errors; they are perhaps confirmed by '(sic)'.
Notice that there is potential for interesting problems if the transcription is checked by machine for consistency of punctuation. It happens that there are more open quotes than close quotes; and it is possible that quotes remain unclosed at the end of a page of text ...

Text Indexing

Keywords for indexing the text have been recorded, as well as I am able: using today's placenames as well as the text's versions; recognising unnamed places if possible; using locality type terms if nothing else is possible; indexing objects and topics only if useful. Thus, I have tried to interpret and understand the text to make the indexing helful and comprehensible in today's world; a basic rule is 'would you want this page if you were searching with this keyword?' Where the text's version of a name differs from the received name today two index entries are made:-
text version (received version)
received version
For example
Leathes Water (Thirlmere)
Thirlmere
This pattern is fairly strictly adhered to, even when the difference in spelling is trivial.

Marginal Comments

Marginal comments have been added by the present editor to make it possible to give a synopisis of the whole.

Map Indexing

The book's map is indexed maps by cutting it up into 'squares', using the national grid so that this map conforms to the indexing used for other maps. Places are indexed using both map and received versions of the placename.

Gazetteer Extracts

Chunks of text relevant to each place are extracted and gathered together, and loaded into the record for the place in the Old Cumbria Gazetteer. The gazetteer holds extracts from other text sources and maps as well as illustration in old prints and modern photographs.
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