A Macron Signifying Nothing: Revisiting The Canterbury Tales Project Transcription Guidelines
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The original transcription guidelines of The Canterbury Tales Project (CTP) were first developed by Peter Robinson and Elizabeth Solopova and were published in 1993. Since then, the project has evolved, bringing about numerous changes of varying degrees to the process of transcription. In this article, we revisit those original guidelines and the principles and aims that informed them and offer a rationale for changes in our transcription practice. We build upon Robinson and Solopova’s assertion that transcription is a fundamentally interpretive act of translation from one semiotic system to another and explore the implications and biases of our own position (e.g. how our interest in the text of The Canterbury Tales prioritizes the minutiae of that text over certain features of the document). We reevaluate the original transcription guidelines in relation to the changes in the project’s practices as a means of clarifying its position. Changes in the project’s practice illustrate how it has adapted to accommodate both necessary compromises and more efficient practices that better reflect the original principles and aims first laid down by Robinson and Solopova. This article provides practical examples that demonstrate those same principles in action as part of the transcription guidelines followed by transcribers working on The Canterbury Tales Project. Rather than perceiving this project as producing a definitive transcription of The Canterbury Tales, the CTP team conceptualizes its work as an open access resource that will aid others in producing their own editions as it has done the heavy lifting of providing a base text.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it