I have just put a new version of the WCP's transcription protocol up on the Transcription page of this website - click on the following link if you want to download it: http://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/sites/wallaceletters.myspecies.info/files/WCP_Transcription_Protocol.Version_6_0.pdf The protocol was revised with helpful suggestions from Charles Smith, Anna Mayer, John van Wyhe, Caroline Catchpole and Efram Sera-Shriar. Thanks to all of you for spending time reading through what is not a very exciting document! Hopefully, the protocol is now sufficiently developed that no further major changes will be required to it in the future.... It is, of course, difficult to foresee every eventuality that letters written by hundreds of different correspondents might present, but our protocol is based on those developed and tested by several major correspondence projects over many years and with thousands of letters....
Caroline tells me that 6 people kindly volunteered to transcribe letters within about 2 hours of me posting my request in my last blog post! I am amazed by the big response and I would like to thank all of you for offering your time to help make Wallace's unpublished correspondence available to the World. Caroline will get back to you all next week with details of how to begin work.
On a related note: I thought it might be a nice idea to set up a forum on this website to enable volunteers to communicate with each other about problems they might be having trying to decipher handwriting etc, as well as enabling them to share interesting snippets about Wallace's life and work that they might discover when reading the letters (most of which have never been properly studied by historians). However, I can't get the built-in forum feature of this website to work at the moment, so more about this anon.
-George-
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