Paleography

[TsarandProphet]

Dear colleagues (and especially those working on Russian and Ottoman sources),

How did you master the art of reading difficult handwriting? By experience only? Using any special books?

[TheHessianHistorian]

8 minutes ago, TsarAndComissar said:

Dear colleagues (and especially those working on Russian and Ottoman sources),

How did you master the art of reading difficult handwriting? By experience only? Using any special books?

Learning Sütterlin and Fraktur scripts (German) for me was just 95% digging right in and figuring it out as I went. A simple Google search yielded a couple of good websites that compared Sütterlin or Fraktur letters to their modern equivalents, which helped in some tough spots. When I got really stuck due to sloppy/faded/ink-blotty handwriting, I would sometimes send a picture of the word or phrase in question to a trusted authority (a professor or researcher) to get their take on it. I also found a really great reference book that lists the most common German words (and their English translations) found in old German vital records and church documents, and I refer to that book often when an archaic word crops up that is too outdated to appear in modern dictionaries.

[unanachronism]

I'm a medievalist and I took a palaeography course over the summer. That gave me a lot of the confidence I needed to keep working with manuscripts/documents and then I've learned more with experience. A lot of it is learning individual letter forms, looking through a page, and finding all of them in all their variations. Also abbreviations are key to learn!

Good luck!

[psstein]

7 hours ago, TsarAndComissar said:

Dear colleagues (and especially those working on Russian and Ottoman sources),

How did you master the art of reading difficult handwriting? By experience only? Using any special books?

Some research libraries (Newberry, for example) offer paleography courses.

You can learn it through coursework, but you master it like any other skill, by repetition.

[LanAMD]

Can't speak for the Russian materials, but for Perso-Arabic script materials there are a number of short (week long type) courses you could check out; most of the ones I know of are in Europe, so if you can get some funding it's  a good excuse for some travel. When I did one I found that while my skills only increased a bit during the week, it gave me a lot more confidence, informed how I worked going forward, and helped me speak more knowledgeably about my materials.

The Berlin Staatsbibliothek runs periodic workshops like this one: 

http://blog.sbb.berlin/turkish-manuscript-studies-an-introduction/

The UK-based Islamic Manuscript Assocation runs courses as well:

http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/courses.aspx

A Spanish Islamic manuscript studies association runs this one, although it's mostly focused on Arabic:

https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/1377482/summer-course-arabic-codicology-islamic-manuscript-heritage-el