Quaker Heritage Press > Catalog of Quaker Writings > Notes on ESR
collection
Notes on ESR's Digital Quaker Collection
The Earlham School of Religion's large Digital Quaker Collection of online texts, announced
in 2003, became available in January 2004.
Its contents were added to this catalog between 3/8/04 (when the
Earlham site was updated to provide links useable by other sites) and 3/18/04 (when the task was
completed). A very few items have not been included here because they fall outside this catalog's
date range; the Earlham project's bibliography can be
consulted for these. (Also see that page for instructions on creating your own links to their
documents; due to technicalities at both their site and ours, merely copying the links as found in
this catalog is not recommended if you wish to use them on your own site.)
Two valuable features of this project are the large number of texts that have been added to
those already online (though with some duplication), and the search engine for finding desired
terms anywhere in Earlham's collection. There are also some defects, as noted below.
The search engine provides several useful features, including a search for explicit Bible
citations, but users should beware of certain potential pitfalls in using it. It is especially important
not to assume that all passages that meet the intended search criteria have actually been
found. Here are several possible ways a desired passage might fail to appear:
- Words are not always spelled the same way in old documents. Some variants will be too far
from the expected spelling to be discoverable. To find the spelling "lamentacion" (for
"lamentation") one need only look for all words beginning with "lament"
("lament*" in a wildcard search); but if "nation" has been spelled
"nacion," how many users will think of looking for all words beginning with
"na" ("na*"), or will have the time to look through the extremely long list
that results? When looking for several words at once, it will be easy to fail to think of some of the
possible variants. When searching for a phrase, the search engine does not even allow for the use
of wildcards.
- In a Bible search (seeking all documents that quote a desired verse), the desired biblical text
may have been quoted or paraphrased in a document without being cited by chapter and verse. It
may also have been cited but the citation misprinted. This is very common at least in 17th-century
documents and probably later, simply because the numbers and abbreviations in biblical citations
were among the hardest things for printers to proofread. If an author intended to cite
1 John 5 but the printer made it John 1:5, the correct reference will not be
there for the search engine to find.
- Some works contain headings or notes in the margins, represented as text in boxes. When
searching these words for a phrase or for several words within a certain distance of each other,
the search may fail merely because the code for a marginal box happens to fall within the desired
phrase.
- When searching for works by a particular author, results may be skewed by the fact that some
sets of collected works have been assigned to too many authors. This may be the result of listing
some (but not all) of the authors of the "testimonies" that often appear as
introductions to an author's collected works.
- Some faded letters are represented by a hyphen in the data. For certain scholarly purposes it is
useful to know that the paper copy was illegible (even if the restoration of missing letters seems
obvious); but a search engine will not recognize a word in this damaged form. The same is true
for cases where the old-style tall s has been mistaken for f; this is most likely to
happen in foreign words and proper names, where context does not provide sufficient clues for
typists and proofreaders. (But it can also happen in such a common word as wise: see the
sample page below.)
- Letters lost in overtrimmed margins may not be represented at all. On one page I found, the
name "Hicks" became "Hick," "against" became
"again," "remonstrance" (hyphenated at a line break) became
"monstrance," and "of" and "to" were lost entirely. But other
missing letters from the margin of the same page were reconstructed without notation.
- Sometimes the editions selected for the project reflect earlier editorial choices to omit or even
alter part of an author's meaning. As one striking example, the 19th-century edition used for John
Woolman's Journal omits many of his thoughts on such topics as dreams and visions, plain
dress, cruelty to animals, smallpox innoculation, and paying taxes for war.
A special difficulty occurs when texts in the ESR collection happen to cite non-English words.
As long as the original texts represent these in a Latin alphabet, the problems are not too severe:
they amount to occasional misspellings that were introduced in the process of scanning and typing
the documents. But words printed in non-Latin alphabets, such as Greek and Hebrew, disappear
entirely. When the reader knows that something has disappeared, it can be recovered, with some
delay, by viewing the page as a graphic; but the context does not always provide sufficient
clues.
Many readers will not care about this, but for those who do, the following example illustrates
the problem. This is from the ESR text of Samuel
Fisher's Rusticus ad Academicos (at p. 198 of his Works); errors are marked in
bold type:
By us when we talk of the Scriptures (to use thy own words, only vice
versa, Ex. 1. Sect. 26. non sanctissima ista veritas, sen materia Scripturarum, sed
scriptura formaliter consider at a indenditur, honestly and plainly we intend that only
which is so, even the form of writing it self, and not the matter, or holy
truths of the Scripture, the Scripturam, and not the Scriptum, or at most
the Litteram Scriptum not the rem Scriptum, not the Verbum
Scriptum, the Declaration, and not the Doctrine declared, ) the To , the ,
the , , not the not the , the letter in the oldness of which thou art yet serving, who knowest
not the newness of the spirit, the Scripture or Writings of the Prophecy & not
the Prophess: of or contained in the writing, nor the Prophetical Word,
the not the the writing, for so the word is there translated truly, 2 Chron. chap.
21. not the Word Written, or word of Prophesie that came to Elijah, and
was sent in a Writing to the King, which thou falsly sayest, p. 12. that
Hebrew word is used for in that Text; and every wife man that is
truly , and not (especially) in a dispute, where the Question is whether the writing
of the Word of God be the word of God written of, or no, while sub judice
est, will, till the thing in debate one way or other be clearly determined, remember
still to keep these two things (as two) asunder.
Correcting this sentence by consulting ESR's graphic of the same page, I find many Greek and
Hebrew words omitted (and one misread as English), some Latin words misspelled, and even two
errors in the English (including a misreading of the tall s in "wise"):
By us when we talk of the Scriptures (to use thy own words, only vice
versa, Ex. 1. Sect. 26. non sanctissima ista veritas, seu materia Scripturarum, sed
scriptura formaliter considerata indenditur, honestly and plainly we intend that only
which is so, even the form of writing it self, and not the matter, or holy
truths of the Scripture, the Scripturam, and not the Scriptum, or at most
the Litteram Scriptam not the rem Scriptam, not the Verbum
Scriptum, the Declaration, and not the Doctrine declared; the 
, the ![ta[t]](ta-t.gif "ta[t]")
, the 
, 
, not the
not the 
, the letter in the oldness of
which thou art yet serving, who knowest not the newness of the spirit, the Scripture or
Writings of the Prophecy & not the Prophesie of, or
contained in the writing, nor the Prophetical Word, the 
not the 
the writing, for so the word is there translated truly, 2 Chron. chap. 21. not the
Word Written, or word of Prophesie that came to Elijah, and was
sent in a Writing to the King, which thou falsly sayest, p. 12. that
Hebrew word
is used for in that Text; and every wise man that is truly 
, and not 
(especially)
in a dispute, where the Question is whether the writing of the Word of God
be the word of God written of, or no, while sub judice l[??] est, will,
till the thing in debate one way or other be clearly determined, remember still to keep these
two things (as two) asunder.
I found this example simply by selecting a document likely to contain a lot of Greek and
Hebrew, and paging into it (about seven pages) until a sequence of commas and spaces
made it obvious that some material was missing. But not all the omissions on this page
would be obvious merely from reading ESR's text version: the clause "which thou
falsly sayest, p. 12. that Hebrew word is used for in that Text" reads
smoothly without the missing Hebrew word and thus does not by itself alert the reader to
the omission. Similar problems presumably occur elsewhere.
As I had to resort to ESR's graphic pages to get the correct text for the foregoing
example, it is worth pointing out that some browsers have had problems viewing those
graphics at the ESR site. In particular, I have found that them regularly failing to display
in Netscape Navigator 7.1; I had to use Internet Explorer 6.0 to get the above page of
Fisher. The problem appears to be in the ESR site's programming; a copy of the graphic
for the above page can be seen here, probably in any
graphics-capable browser. Update (3/14/04): After this notice first appeared here
on 3/13/04, the ESR site was offline for most of the day on 3/14 and returned in the evening
with partially improved graphics in Netscape. I have not yet had time to explore the new
version very much, but users should note that if Netscape starts to load a graphic which
then appears to vanish, it may actually have been expanded to such a size that only the
upper left margin appears in the window. In this case the browser's "View
Image" command may help obtain a resizeable image, possibly in conjunction with
the site's "Bigger" and "Smaller" buttons.
Larry Kuenning, QHP webmaster
This page was last modified 6/14/2014.
