I’ve been spend a bit of time working on the civil war blog, Daily Observations from The Civil War, and, as a result, have been missing from here for a bit. However, since much of what will be posted in that blog is going to be time relevant, I want to get a good handle on it before things really start happening.
It’s highly likely that I will be going back to work for another 6 month stint beginning in January which means that I’ll be working during the 150th anniversary of the run-up to and beginning of the civil war. The amount of time that I’ll have for working on the blog will, thus, be limited – which is the reason for the effort now.
I’m currently working with “Village Life in America, 1852 – 1872,” by Caroline Cowles Richards. I went ahead and back posted entries from the early days of her diary and am pre-posting entries after November 14, 1860 so each will be published on the applicable day.
Things were going fine until I discovered the e-text I was using didn’t match the text in the pdf copy I was using to check spelling and wording against. I had already run into missing text earlier, but had just assumed that an error had been made in electronic transcription.
But, then, I ran into an instance where the entry in the pdf version for a particular date had a lot more information and detail.
It turns out that the pdf version is a “new and enlarged” edition.
In looking into it a little further, it turns out that it is at least the third published edition of Miss Richard’s diary and, probably, has entries included that were left out of the previous editions.
So now I am going back and comparing editions and adding new posts where they were omitted.
Of course, if I used the e-text and pdf for the same edition, there wouldn’t have been any discrepency to be found.
I’ll be incorporating more diaries into the blog, but I’ll make sure that the text and pdf versions are from the same source document.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had joined with two others on The American Civil War page on facebook. That was 3 weeks ago and the “friend” count for the page was 1,385. Today, it went over 2,500.
