Centre Mills Journal: Undergraduate Summer Research Project

The Centre Mills Journal is a double-entry accounting ledger kept in 1847-1848 by Samuel Chapin for Laban Morey Wheaton's cotton batting mill in Norton, MA. Its transcription and markup according to TEI guidelines is a continuation of the work done by Kathryn Tomasek and Wheaton college students in 2016. In this presentation, I go through the process of navigating TEI and historical accounting records from the perspective of an undergraduate with no prior encoding experience. I talk about what the Centre Mills Journal was, the types of transactions that occurred, and the decisions that were made or left unanswered regarding how to mark up the structure, irregularities, and commodified labor in the book.