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General Conventions |
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Our goal is to provide readers with reliable transcripts of early Mormon documents in a readable, searchable format. The recently released BCR illustrates how complex transcripts can be. We do not try to document every jot and tittle, but we do try to retain the flavor of the original, including indicators of the process by which the documents were produced. |
| Spelling,
caps, punctuation |
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Original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are preserved, but line breaks and associated hyphens are not. |
| Page
numbers, placement |
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Page numbers of paginated works are enclosed in brackets at the beginning of each page: [6] marks the beginning of page 6. |
| Page numbers, format |
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Many letters, diaries, reminiscences, and volume 1 of EMS and the first
twelve issues of vol. 2 are unpaginated. We supply page numbers
for these works in braces: {4}. |
| Paragraphs |
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The traditional ¶ symbol marks paragraph breaks in the original, including indicators such as indentations, long blank spaces, and some dashes or other symbols. |
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Breaks without ¶ are supplied for readability. |
| Block quotes |
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Block quotes are indicated by a yellow bar left of the text. |
| Missing words |
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Missing words supplied by the editor are enclosed in brackets: the church
[of] Christ. |
| Repetitions |
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Unintentional repetitions are ignored: the rather than the the. |
| Indecipherable words |
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Indecipherable words are represented by hyphens in brackets: [-]. |
| Partially-legible words |
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When one or more letters cannot be clearly defined, but in context the intent is clear, standard spelling
or the scribe's routine non-standard
spelling is supplied. |
| Indecipherable letters |
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When the intent of a partially-legible word is not clear, the entire word is rendered as indecipherable: [-] rather than sto◊◊◊◊es or sto[...]es. |
| Conjectural words |
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When the intent is not clear, conjectural readings are enclosed in braces {word} or rendered as indecipherable [-]. |
| Ambiguous spellings |
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Alternate conjectural readings are separated by a slash within braces: {land/lord}. |
| Strikethroughs |
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Strikethroughs always precede insertions regardless of the original sequence, and phrases are kept together: Crusified by the Sins of the <Sinfull men for the Sins of the> world; rather than the more literal <Sinfull men> Crusified by the Sins of the world <for the Sins of the>. |
| Corrections |
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Scribal write-overs are usually not parsed: God rather than god <God> or {g\<G>}od. |
| Color coding |
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In side-by-side transcripts, colors are used to identify variant wording. In most instances, blue identifies words that do not appear in the version to the right; red, words that do not appear to the left. Other colors are used when more than two versions are compared. |
| Redactions |
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With access to the original documents and state-of-the-art imaging technology, and hand-writing expertise, BCR editors have made a quantum leap forward in identifying the persons who had a hand in the evolution of revelation texts. |
| Redaction colors |
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In BCR, redactors and their changes are color coded. Original texts and corrections made at the time of inscription are black; changes made at a later time are colored. For example, if scribe John Whitmer inserts a word in the course of writing the text, it appears in black: the Lord <our> God. But if he later returns as a redactor, the change appears in his color: the Lord <our> God. |
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We also retain the color coding to identify the same wording in side-by-side versions. |
| Redaction strikethroughs |
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In BCR, strikethrough lines are color-coded. I haven't found a way to do this in HTML, so we use the same color for both the word and the line: he, even though ideally he should be black. |
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Numerically, most changes are seemingly innocuous: you to ye, this to the, which to who, and so forth. |
| Patterns |
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For example, in D&C 20, BCR, PT, Book A, and Book B have multiple instances of the church. But Oliver Cowdery has systematically written over the es to produce this church. This church also appears in EMS, BC, and DC. |
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So in the BCR version we render both the original and the change: the <this>. In PT, Book A, and Book B we have the church, and in EMS, BC, and DC, this church. |
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We can only speculate about Oliver's reasons for the/this change and others like it, but the issue cannot be joined until the patterns are first discovered. Although I am, unfortunately, entirely consistent at this early stage, but my intention is to italicize only changes that suggest a pattern. |
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