The Experience of Scholarly Labor: Recording Affect in Transcription Abstract

Margaret Simon, North Carolina State University

This essay reports on my work to create a series of videos documenting novel encounters of students and faculty in various fields and sub-fields with the Baumfylde MS (Folger V.a. 456). My goal was to understand how different constituencies engage the process of transcription in a low-stakes, minimally scaffolded scenario. The resulting recordings demonstrate many of the challenges to capturing the serendipity and immediacy of the transcription process given the necessarily somewhat artificial nature of our recording sessions. Nonetheless, the sheer range of conversations and responses provided by scholars, whether faculty, graduate, or undergraduate, was noteworthy as they moved fluidly from discussions of the technologies and content to broader considerations of how we develop our intellectual lives. The videos present an argument, from the perspective of users/students rather than developers/teachers, into the surprisingly multi-disciplinary, and even un-disciplinary, conversations and insights the “micro-labor” of transcribing even a small section of a manuscript can inspire.