Page xl →Page xli →Note on transcription
The secretaries of the Clionian Debating Society crafted their organizational proceedings with great care. Despite the passage of time and the inevitable deterioration of paper and ink, the two volumes are easy to read, owing primarily to the society secretaries’ highly legible handwriting. In creating this transcription, I have worked with the original manuscripts as well as with reproductions. Whereas examining layers of ink in the originals can best reveal the gestures of writing and thus increase confidence in the accuracy of a transcription, inspecting facsimiles that can be enlarged assists in deciphering cramped or crossed-out material.1
The process of preparing a scholarly edition in print and digital form based on handwritten text is a technological translation rather than a replication; for example, graphical features of the secretaries’ handwriting are lost. Nonetheless, I have relied on a theory of transcription with two goals in mind, both of which can promote learning about the debating society as an educational endeavor.2 First, I have sought to convey accurately the propositional content of the minutes, and second, insofar as possible, I have retained evidence of the society secretaries’ compositional practices and decisions about revisions, whether made at the moment of inscription or as part of collaborative review in a society meeting. In keeping with those goals, I have maintained original punctuation and spelling, and material that the society secretaries crossed out in the original, where it is decipherable, is presented here, struck through; words that the secretaries overwrote or erased to the point of illegibility are not noted. Original interlineations are marked as such with carets (for example, “Annual Orator ^for 1852^”). Repeated words are reproduced, followed by [sic]. Occasional nonstandard spellings (for example, “thier” for “their”) are followed by [sic] at the first appearance and retained unmarked thereafter. Grammatical errors, which usually involve subject-verb disagreement or unconnected clauses, are preserved without comment.
At the same time, I occasionally refined the text to facilitate reading. Using brackets, I have added letters or words when omissions are obvious: “defer[r]ed,” Page xlii →“regular monthly [meeting].” Some graphical choices are standardized: Although society secretaries wrote “Mr.” and “Mr,” “Jr.” and “Jr,” “Wm.” and “Wm,” “4th” and “4th,” this transcription presents these abbreviations consistently without superscripts. Likewise, secretaries’ sporadic use of the long s (ſ), common in eighteenth-century print and some nineteenth-century handwriting, appears here as its modern equivalent (for example, business, not busineſs).
Numbered endnotes offer my own explanations of usage or historical details. To encourage attentiveness to the minutes themselves, I have kept these interventions to a minimum. Footnotes created by society secretaries in the original minutes are marked with an asterisk (*) at the insertion point, as the secretaries did it; the substance of asterisked notes occurs here within the main text, at the end of the entries in which the asterisks appear.
Finally, readers will soon see that as rich as these meeting minutes are, they regularly call attention to documents that are no longer extant. For example, the minutes refer to the manuscripts of members’ orations and to the society’s constitution, bylaws, rules, lists of resolutions, lists of elected officers, and financial records; at the time of this writing, those materials have not resurfaced. Yet evidence of absence invites our attention as well.3 The Clionians once created manuscript orations and formal society documents; whether or not those materials ever reappear, recognizing their creation and use constitutes substantive knowledge of ambition and a cooperative practice of learning.
Yet in this case we do not have to investigate absence alone. So much can be learned from presence. The survival of these two volumes of society proceedings is remarkable. They are an incomparable treasure, even as their distinctiveness illuminates the histories of limits on Black freedom and the politics of archiving.
I now invite you to read them with me, to remember, and to imagine.
Notes
- 1. For the volume in Charleston, I used the original and also reproductions in the form of microfiche and, during a later proofreading stage, a digital facsimile posted online at Charleston Library Society, “Proceedings of the Clionian Debating Society,” 2023, https://charlestonlibrarysociety.omeka.net/items/show/1263. For the volume at Duke, I relied on the original, on scanned images I created at the library, and, for later proofreading, on a digital facsimile posted online at Duke University Libraries, “Continued Proceedings of the Clionian Debating Society, 1851–1858,” https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r47949881.
- 2. On transcription processes, see W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950/1951): 19–36; Robert N. Gaines, “The Processes and Challenges of Textual Authentication,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (New York: Wiley, 2010), 134–56; and Modern Language Association, “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions,” Page xliii →last revised May 4, 2022, https://www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/Guidelines-for-Editors-of-Scholarly-Editions.
- 3. See, e.g., Odai Johnson, “The Size of All That’s Missing,” in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx (London: Routledge, 2021), 43–64.