These files contain ASCII text derived from a collection of Hockett’s transcriptions of Potawatomi fieldwork that was done during the 1930’s as research for his dissertation.
I am working from copies of scans produced by Tammy L. Goss before the materials were archived at the Smithsonian. Her file naming conventions were retained on the files in ‘texts’. The original scanned files also included handwritten transcription and translation in some cases but the original files were too large to include in the repository.
An effort was made to preserve the original formatting so that the text files are organized roughly like the typed pages. The included Makefile contains tasks that will transform the texts into formats usable for a variety of purposes.
These texts deserve further documentation but for the time being the focus will be on making them usable for further research.
I am using a custom notation to type up these texts using only ASCII letters.
| Hockett | Typed Text |
| ’ (non-quote separator character) | \ |
| · | + |
| č | _ |
| š | $ |
| ə | @ |
| ʔ | = |
These do not correspond to any previous notation used and were chosen entirely for ease of typing and the fact that they do not conflict with any characters used in English portions of the Hockett texts.
The included Makefile can convert these to appropriate UTF8 unicode if you run:
make unicodeThings that are crossed out or that do not correspond to an easy to interpret character will be written ‘#’. These will have a note in the notes.org file. They will be listed by line and column number.
Additional notes that do not correspond to ‘#’ in the typed text can also be found in the notes.org file with the same line and column number convention.
Here is an example:
** DONE CraneBoyTranscriptionTyped
CLOSED: [2014-12-19 Fri 03:36]
12,39 Looks like a handwriten dash but curved.
25,31-41 A crossed out word. The line organization becomes briefly
confused soon after.
The section of notes will be headed by a line that begins with two ‘*’ symbols. This will be followed by the status, either ‘DONE’ or ‘TODO’. If it is ‘DONE’ the line below will show when it was finished. Below this you can see two example notes. The first has simple coordinates in the form ‘line,column’. The second has more complex coordinates for a note that corresponds to some section of the text that spans multiple columns.
It is problematic that it is not clear from simply looking at the text whether there is necessarily a note at a particular point. A future HTML version will combine the text with the notes.
Note that notes.org is an emacs org mode file. Some of the header text will not be visible unless you view the source.
The files in the ‘texts’ subdirectory are derived from scans produced by Tammy L. Goss. She provided some notes on the files in two MS Word files. I have reproduced the content of those original notes here.
The original file name was ‘TGNotes on Hockett Scans.docx’.
The following preceded the text and was also duplicated at the end of the notes:
- Tammy L. Goss
- Notes on Hockett Scans: Typed Potawatomi Stories
- Last Update: Wednesday, November 3, 2010
The following text in the subsections ‘Filenames are:’ and ‘NOTES:’ has been altered only in minor formatting changes but is otherwise as written by Tammy L. Goss.
- CraneBoyTranscription
- PotawatomiAS_32-34
- PotawatomiStory2pages
- PotawatomiTextJA_AS_pp1-28
All individual files have been combined in Adobe PDF. All individual files are still saved individually; in RAW and JPEG format.
- CraneBoyTranscription
- 8 pages of typed transcription that were stapled together
- PotawatomiAS_32-24
- 3 pages with handwritten (in pencil) page numbers written in the upper right corner. They may be have been part of the packet that makes up file PotawatomiTextJA_AS_pp1-28, but the PotawatomiAS_32-24 pages were stapled together and stored separately from PotawatomiTextJA_AS_pp1-28 in Hockett’s files, so therefore I cannot assume that they are from the same sequential numbering.
- PotawatomiStory2pages
- These are two vellum, typed pages of Potawatomi text. They were stored next to the papers I have named PotawatomiAS_32-24, but were not included in the stapled group. All of the papers were in a folder marked Potawatomi in Hockett’s handwriting so it is safe to assume, unless proven otherwise, that these two pages are indeed Potawatomi.
- PotawatomiTextJA_AS_pp1-28
- These pages were double-stapled on the left-hand side (see first image) and comprise several Potawatomi texts. They were dictated to Hockett by JA (unknown as to who this is) and AS (Alice Spear). Pages are numbered in pencil in the upper right hand corner of each page. Pages 17-22 were not included in the packet and I have not come across them in other boxes yet.
- NOTE: For some reason when I converted the images to PDF, some of the pages appear on the screen as normal or larger than normal size and others smaller than normal. I have tried to fix this but I have not found a way to do this yet. For now, you can use the magnifying lens to zoom in and out of the pages to make them more readable.
The original file name was FileNamingConventionsForTyped_HandwrittenPairings.docx
It contained the following tables.
| Typed | ASJuly13_1937_1 | LL | 2_1-2_4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hockett’s typed text | Header on Hockett’s typed text | Loose leaf | Images 2_1 through 2_4 (original TIF files) |
| Typed | ASJuly29_1937_10 | Notebook4 | 26b-30 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hockets typed text | Header on Hockett’s typed text | Notebook # | Images 26b-30 (original TIF files) |
Hockett, Charles. Charles F. Hockett papers, 1934-2000, bulk 1940-1989. Papers of Charles F. Hockett, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.anthropology.si.edu/naa/fa/hockett.pdf
All information not under preexisting copyright is covered by the following license, also in the file LICENSE.
Charles Hockett Potawatomi Texts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.