Handwriting Guide goes live

We are very pleased to announce that a guide to Alexander Carmichael’s handwriting is now available online.

Anyone who has read (or perhaps more correctly tried to read) Carmichael’s hand will inevitably come across difficulties in understanding it, particularly with his field notebooks where notes were written at speed while listening to or engaging with informants. This speed led to poorly formed letters and the need for abbreviations, of which there are many.

Included in the Handwriting Guide is an introduction to his handwriting, a section on handwriting problems and examples of his hand with transcripts. The Guide also contains an extensive selection of letterforms, numbers and symbols, which are demonstrated using digital images taken from his notebooks; and a list of abbreviations, which will be regularly updated as listing and transcription work progresses and more abbreviations are identified.

We hope that this resource will prove invaluable to researchers and we welcome your comments on it.

You can find the Handwriting Guide here: http://www.carmichaelwatson.lib.ed.ac.uk/handwriting.php