I browsed the National Archives web site, and found that they offer two downloadable images, one a photograph of the original parchment, and another of the 1823 engraving by William Stone, both apparently in the public domain.
So I took a few minutes of my Fourth of July holiday to set up a CITE Image Service where you can browse and create citable references of the images. Here is the detail of the crucial passage in the photograph of the parchment:
.
In the Image Collection I created this afternoon, this detail can be cited generically with this URN
urn:cite:mid:natarchimgs.Declaration_Pg1of1_AC@0.472,0.1872,0.082,0.0213and the URN can also be resolved to see the detail in context.
Contrast the Stone engraving:
(citable as
urn:cite:mid:natarchimgs.Declaration_Engrav_Pg1of1_AC@0.465,0.1919,0.076,0.0177
, and viewable in context here)With references like this, it would be easy to cite other examples in the document of periods and long dashes, much as participants at last week’s Homer Multitext seminar collated evidence to interpret features of the oldest extant manuscript of the Iliad.
Conclusions? The parchment of the Declaration is hard to read, but paleography is important, and the CITE architecture that was originally created for the Homer Multitext project can be applied to any sort of paleographic problem.
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