Yesterday was a big day at Estoria Towers, even though it almost passed without us noticing. It was the day that the biggest and most time-consuming task of the project was finally completed. For three and a half years we have been working on transcribing the five witnesses of the Estoria de Espanna, and yesterday Enrique pressed save on the transcription of the final folio. Without the transcriptions of these witnesses we would be unable to create our digital edition of the chronicle, which is, of course, the main thing we are aiming to produce in this project. Over the past few years the number of people working on the task of transcription has been considerable – this is truly a group transcription project: the bulk of the task has been carried out by our venerable and untiring research fellows Fiona Maguire and Enrique Jerez, as well as Ricardo Pichel, more recently. Alongside them have been working myself and Christian, Aengus, Nick, Bárbara, Marine, Alicia, a group of hardworking crowdsourcers, and several others who I will not mention here for risk of forgetting someone, but whose names will appear when we publish the edition. For many of us who have worked on preparing the transcriptions this has been a steep learning curve – I know I am not the only person who was introduced to palaeography, XML and the TEI purely to enable me to transcribe for this project. It is also important to remember that the transcriptions we have created are not the definitive version of the text, but rather just another witness, and just like the medieval scribes of Alfonso’s scriptorium and those who have copied, edited or re-touched the witnesses in the past, we are liable to make mistakes, assumptions and in place of slips of the pen, typographical errors. Each transcribed folio has been checked and re-checked, edited and re-edited, but as is the case in all academic research, despite our best efforts, some errors will have slipped through the net and will make it to the final edition. Of course, as a digital edition, once identified, we could always remove these errors, but this brings with it issues of when is enough enough – is enough ever enough? – should we freeze the edition as it was on the day it was published, or should we continue re-touching ad nauseam, for as long as tools, server space and the limits of human effort allow? These are questions for another day – for now let us bask in the satisfaction of having completed something, of having worked together over a number of years to create something that is better than what any of us could have done alone, no matter how long we had worked on it. Not strictly intended to celebrate the final pressing of save, but serendipitous nonetheless, Christian presented us at tea-break yesterday with his first Victoria sponge – and very successful it was too. Basking done, cake consumed, we went back to our desks and carried on with the next tasks of the project, which is where we find ourselves today – cracking back on.
