The Q3 Collation

Not being 100% satisfied with my results from my collation of Q2 with my transcript of Q1, I decided to up the ante and do some even more hard core collating. For purposes of Q3, that meant going backwards through the script one word at a time. It was pretty slow going at first, but ten or so pages into the process I got into the rhythm of collating, and I dare say that this was faster and more accurate than my previous method.

You may, of course, raise the objection that I had caught and corrected most errors on my Q2 collation. You might even be right, however, I caught a substantial amount of Q1 transcription errors on this pass, too. It almost makes me wonder if it's worth the effort of going through with Q2 once more to make sure I didn't make any collation errors in that pass. Then again, as I turn back to my records of that collation, I did note a substantial amount of variations, largely concentrated in the same places of textual ambiguity as the variations in Q3.

No collation is perfect. No edition is definitive. That's why the next generation must collate and edit again. That's why people are still making money selling copies of books that have been publicly available for 400 years. At this point in the process, it will no doubt be better to invest my energies in moving on to Q4, and perhaps more importantly, turning my attention to the needs of my cast.

First read through is tomorrow, and while it saddens me that I won't have my full cast present, it will be nice to get everything started and get the ship sailing.