To check a transcription against the original is called collation. Collation is standard practice in most disciplines that deal with manuscripts. According to some people, American history is not one of those disciplines.
I would like to illustrate the important role that collation plays in a review published this year in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Pascal Attinger reviews a volume but the late William W. Hallo, who taught me both Old Assyrian and Sumerian at Yale. The volume came out posthumously after Hallo had been working on it for more than half a century. Attinger's review is 17 pages long (Pascal Attinger, "Critical Review," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 71 [2019]: 191-207). It consists of a one page introduction, and ends with a three page bibliography. In between are fourteen pages of detailed corrections, mostly collations of the texts. Of the seventy-one texts in the volume, only four are missing collations. The reviewer thought ninety-four percent of the texts could benefit from correction through collating them again.
This need not reflect maliciousness on the reviewer's part. Hallo himself had published important advances in understanding through collating previous work again. I remember that in some cases where I had the publication of the text we were reading, and he had brought in the actual tablet that he let me collate it during class. Pas d'histoire.
