How the Spanish Paleography Tool works
The Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool is intended to assist users in the deciphering and reading of early modern Spanish handwriting styles (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) by helping them identify and recognize the individual letters and words of those handwriting styles. This is achieved by offering side-by-side typed transcriptions, in contemporary print typeface, of the words contained in each manuscript, either on a word-by-word or a line-by-line basis. (A transcription is a rewriting or printing of any given text in a writing or alphabetic system different from the one it was originally written in. In this case we use the contemporary Spanish alphabet typeface to represent the early modern handwritten letters. )
The main content of the Spanish Paleography Tool consists of a selected number of digital copies of manuscripts from La Española dating from sixteenth and seventeenth century. The sample manuscripts showcased in the Tool are representative of the different handwriting styles prevalent throughout the Spanish-language world during early modern times: cortesana handwriting, procesal handwriting, encadenada handwriting, and humanística handwriting.
This Paleography Tool offers two ways of viewing a manuscript text and its transcription simultaneously to help the user memorize and recognize the peculiarities of the handwriting style the manuscript is written in. One shows the manuscript image alone accompanied by word-by-word transcription tool-tips or tags. It is activated by electing a manuscript from the “Select a document” drop down menu on the Tool’s home page and, once opened, to hover the computer mouse pointer over any given word of the manuscript. As the pointer is laid on a word, a small pop-up window opens next to it showing the exact transcription of the word.
The other mode shows the side-by-side images of an entire manuscript page and its line-by-line typed transcription. It is activated by pulling down the “Manuscript Description” strip at the top of an opened manuscript, and then clicking on the “Download transcription” link on the right side of the strip. A window then opens showing a double image of the manuscript on the left and its full transcription on the right.
The repeated exposure to manuscript words of the different handwriting styles and their respective transcriptions will allow users of the Tool to progressively familiarize themselves with the letters and the words of the old handwriting styles, until finally recognizing them with ease. By repeatedly engaging in a visual traveling between sample manuscripts and their transcriptions in either of these two modes offered by the Tool, users will soon learn to effectively decipher and read the handwritten Spanish texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.