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.

How Collation Worked

I talked a little bit about my collation process last night, but I figured it might be fun and interesting to mention the details. To begin with, I started with a print out of my transcription of Q1, a print out of Q2, and a print out of Q1. I suppose I could have left one (or more, with a bigger monitor) of these in a digital format, but I very specifically wanted to make sure that my transcript was a print out. Why? I didn't want to be able to make any of my edits to it have any degree of permanence associated with them. I'll get back to that later.

Then I proceeded backwards through the text, one line at a time. Backwards because it prevented me from reading the text, and missing valuable data. I would read a line of Q2 out loud, read a line from my transcript (out loud), and then re-read the line in Q2 (again, out loud). Then I would move on to the next line. Now maybe you can understand why this takes  a while and you can't do it for very long successfully.

When I encountered a discrepancy between Q2 and my transcript, I would turn back to Q1. If my transcript matched Q1, I would make a note of the variation in blue pen on my transcript. If my transcript did not match Q1, I would note the variation between my transcript and Q1 in red pen, and then I would compare that with Q2, and if there was still a variation note that in blue pen. The double variant didn't happen especially often. 

After I had made my way through the entire script, I went back to my digital copy and made my edits: correcting transcription errors from Q1, and making notes whenever there was a variation in Q2. On some very rare occasions I have chosen to modernize a word or use the Q2 variant, but in those cases, I have left a note in the text (using the notes feature, thank God for word processing) describing what Q1 actually says. 

It is a long and tedious process. Now step back to 1608 where word processors don't exist, and type is set out manually from manuscript copy in a dirty, noisy environment where you're working on a deadline and get paid by the page. I made a lot of mistakes in my transcription of Q1, and thinking about all the tools I have available to use, as well as my comparatively voluptuously luxurious work environment, makes me a lot more forgiving of any mistakes that the original printers might have made along the way.

Lessons in Collation

I recently finished collating the second quarto with my transcription of the first quarto. I knew going into it that the differences would be relatively minor, and based on the principle that a change is transmission is a breeding ground for errors, I think that most of the differences don't really qualify as "improvements." Most of the time, if Q2 has something different from Q1, it's worthy of a foot note, some of the time it might be useful to know there is another option available, and maybe one of these differences will actually find its way into one of the final products.

Still, the exercise was extremely valuable for one simple reason: I made a lot of my own errors when transcribing Q1 into a digital file. The differences between Q1 and Q2 were so minute that the only way I would be able to catch them was to go line by line, and every time I encountered a discrepancy between Q2 and my transcription, I turned back to Q1. Most of the time these discrepancies were the result of sloppy work on my part, but being able to see that helped me realize something that I hadn't thought of before: transcribing and collating quartos requires a lot of focus.

When I was making my initial transcription of Q1, I pushed myself through bleary eyes and headaches to get the thing finished as quickly as possible. That was a mistake, and seeing the sheer number of mistakes I made as a result of taking that approach helped me realized that working that way is extremely unproductive. What good is a collation if you can't rely on the copy you're collating against? So I took the Q2 collation much more slowly than I did the Q1 transcription, which is one of the reasons why I only recently finished.

The reward for finishing this collation will be collating what I have now with Q3. Experience tells me that is going to take a while. I almost said it would take even longer, but making the decision to use Q1 as my copy text means I'm not obliged to check every single discrepancy against Q1 and Q2; in fact, that would be a waste of time; I've already noted the differences between Q2 and my copy text. Now I need to see how Q3 informs my copy text, which will of necessity include Q2, as that is now a part of the text I'm working from.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm even more interested in collating my text laterally against the other Q1s out there in the world (besides the copy I got off of EEBO). Hmm.... because I and obsessive compulsive and like pain, I think I might have to look into that.

Why am I going out of my way to make my life harder, anyway? Sheesh.