Image: Two of the pages from Sir Francis Austen's memoir (Jane Austen's House)
Volunteers transcribed Admiral Sir Francis Austen’s handwritten memoir page by page, with the museum now publishing the document online for free.
Hampshire museum Jane Austen’s House has published a memoir by Sir Francis Austen after enlisting volunteers to help by transcribing a page.
Last year the museum acquired the then unpublished memoir by Admiral Sir Francis William Austen, brother of the famed author.
The memoir was written in Interested fans were asked to receive a high-quality scan of one page, in what is believed to be his own handwriting.
Within 24 hours the museum had received over 2,000 offers from keen volunteer transcribers. It has now completed the crowdsourced project, having transcribed the 41-page Memoir and published it online for free.
The volunteers were each assigned a page of the Memoir and dutifully transcribed it. These transcriptions were then compared and combined to create a full transcription.
The museum explained: “The task was not without its challenges – from interesting spelling and punctuation to spindly handwriting, the Memoir was not always the easiest to read.”
The document contains an account of Frank Austen’s life from his childhood in Chawton – the village in which the museum is based – through to his time in the Navy and his return to, and retirement in his home village.
The museum said: “We are so grateful to everyone that helped us with this project and are delighted to have brought together amateur historians, fans of Jane Austen, and friends of the Museum from all around the world. It was an impressive undertaking and a rewarding one.”
Author Diane Setterfield was among those to transcribe. Setterfield wrote: “Transcribing requires you to pay close attention, for an abnormally long time, to small hand-produced marks on paper. Do it for long enough and you start to notice things that are not words, and not even letters. Wobbles. Deletions. Uneven spacing. These elements do not convey meaning in any conventional sense, but that is not to say they are meaningless.
“They might, for instance, tell us something about the human body that performs the physical act of writing: ‘Tired Frank?’ I wondered, when I saw cramped letters pile up on each other. They might indicate a state of mind: ‘Changed your mind? What were you going to say?”
The memoir is now on display at the House, in the Brothers’ Room, and its transcription is available here.
