The other side of a commitment to full and accurate transcription is 
the inevitable awareness--born of inevitable experience--that all of us 
will at one point violate that commitment unintentionally.  Is there 
anyone who routinely transcribes historical documents as part of their 
research who hasn't at some point inadvertently failed to copy down 
some text, from haste or some other reason?   And is there any one of 
us who routinely reads scholarly work who hasn't noticed a misquotation 
in the writing of some highly respected colleague?

Of course, the best remedy is near-obsessive checking and rechecking, 
and the confidence that, if the document being transcribed or quoted is 
already available elsewhere, one's peers will draw one's attention to 
the error without attributing sinister motives to it.

I'm sorry, but there is no reason to suppose that the case Mr. Dixon 
cites was anything other than just such an inadvertent transcription 
error.  Even if I didn't find the integrity of Ms. Gordon-Reed's 
scholarship in the rest of her book reason enough not to suspect 
nefarious purposes in this instance, I would find it difficult to 
suppose that any intelligent scholar embarked on a project such as 
Gordon-Reed's book wouldn't be fully aware that (1) the document she 
was transcribing had already been published elsewhere in a widely 
available journal (it was in the 1970s in the Proceedings of the 
American Antiquarian Society, if memory serves) and was therefore 
otherwise available to scholars; and (2) given the controversial nature 
of her book's argument, the supporting documentation would be 
thoroughly re-checked by those hostile to it, so that any attempt to 
misrepresent the text deliberately would be immediately discovered.

A measure of realism as well as fairness is called for here.  This was 
an honest mistake, such as any one of us might make, probably caused by 
the transcriber's eye skipping over a line of text and then a failure 
to re-check her work.  Let it go.

--Jurretta Heckscher


On Oct 27, 2006, at 5:15 PM, Richard Dixon wrote:

> The various comments on the obligation to provide complete and 
> accurate quotations raise the more interesting issue of consequence. 
> The rules seem to be understood, but when they are violated, what 
> happens?.
>
> In her letter of October 24, 1858 Ellen Coolidge wrote to her husband:
> “His (Thomas Jefferson’s) apartment had no private entrance not 
> perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female 
> domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known 
> not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to 
> the public gaze.”
>
> In her "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," 
> Annette Gordon-Reed  included as an appendix the letter of Ellen 
> Coolidge, but altered it in this manner: “No female domestic ever 
> entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in 
> the public gaze”
>
> Gordon-Reed later brushed off the alteration, although it reversed the 
> meaning of the sentence. The University Press of Virginia first 
> published her book in 1997 and continues to publish it without 
> correction or an errata insert.  Inexplicably, the Thomas Jefferson 
> Foundation printed the original Coolidge hand-written letter in its 
> Research Committee Report in 2000, but used the Gordon-Reed letter as 
> the “printed version.” Today, Monticello continues to reference the 
> Gordon-Reed version on its website with no explanation that it is in 
> error.
>
> No college student could commit such a distortion and escape censure. 
> As always, the lower the violator is on the totem pole, the easier it 
> is to pile on. Can anyone cite an instance of condemnation from 
> academics when fellow academics are caught?
>
> Richard E. Dixon
> Editor, Jefferson Notes
> Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society
> 703-691-0770
> fax 703-691-0978
>

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