This topic is the place to introduce yourself and get to know others.
Feel free to share a bit about yourself:
Who are you?
Tell us your name (or your username, if you prefer) and a bit about your background. Are you a student, archivist, historian, or family researcher?
What is your research about?
What topics are you currently researching or have researched in the past?
What kinds of manuscripts do you work with?
Share the kinds of historical documents you use for your research.
How are you using Leo?
How do you use Leo to transcribe and organize your documents?
Hello everyone! My name is Jon and I’m a PhD candidate in the History Department at Stanford. When I’m not working on Leo, I’m busy finishing my dissertation, which reinterprets the emergence of economic thought in England at the turn of the seventeenth century through the lens of monetary history.
My research involves looking at a range of manuscripts at archives in the UK, to reconstruct how early modern people thought about coinage, usury, and the system of foreign exchange. They’re mostly written in English, though some are in Law French, Latin, and other European languages. They range from formal treatises reproduced in very legible Italic hands to more rushed position papers and reports in secretary hand. There are also some merchants’ letters where not only is the handwriting very difficult but the paper is also damaged. It was while manually transcribing these documents that I came up with the idea for Leo.
For my dissertation project, I plan to use Leo to make my personal archive searchable, so that I can easily retrieve the passages that I need while writing up. I’d like in the future to transcribe a much larger corpus of manuscripts, to interpret with more advanced natural language processing approaches, as a means to retrace linguistic changes over time that might not be possible to detect in printed texts.
I’m excited to get to know you all, to hear about your experiences using Leo, and to work on building this community.
Hi everyone! I’m Jack and, along with Jon, I’m one of the founders of Leo.
Probably unlike most of you, my background is not in history but in machine learning/AI. During my PhD at Cambridge, my research was focused on AI to help understand physics data. After that, I co-founded an AI biotechnology company and was the Chief Technology Officer there for most of a decade. I’m currently interested in multimodal (e.g. image-to-text) models, like the ones we develop at Leo.
I’ll be working with Jon (and all of you) to improve the quality of our transcriptions and our web application. Please don’t be shy with your feedback – any issues or requests for new features let us know!
I am a legal historian working on the intersection of state and federal administrative law, local government law, citizenship, and private law. I am interested in how law can promote state formation, economic development, and responsive, democratic governance. My dissertation is about the underappreciated shift in American governance from a world of compulsory obligations (i.e. Americans built roads, held local offices, served on juries, performed law enforcement, and discharged other tasks of governance to fulfill their obligations to the state) to a world of money taxes and professional administration.
I work with a lot of legal materials–session laws, reported court cases, etc. But I want to do more with handwritten local government records (county minutes, local court records, etc.). I’m planning to see how well Leo transcribes these materials with the hope that I can get OCRable text that will let me move more quickly through the material and make sure I find the relevant matters. Depending on how effective Leo is, it may be useful long term for data processing as well.
Hello! My name is Rebeca MartĂnez-Tibbles, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in History at UCLA. My research focuses on Colonial Mexico, particularly gender, race, and religion in New Spain. I also explore topics related to the Spanish Inquisition, marriage and bigamy, the Bourbon Reforms, and Indigenous languages and cultures, particularly Nahuatl.
My dissertation, Women and Bigamy in Colonial Mexico: 16th to 18th Centuries, examines the experiences of women accused of bigamy and how their cases reveal broader themes of gender, power, and social mobility in colonial society. By analyzing legal records, Inquisition trials, and ecclesiastical proceedings, I explore how women navigated marriage, sexuality, and legal constraints in a highly regulated world.
I primarily work with colonial-era manuscripts from Mexican and Spanish archives, including Inquisition records, marriage dispensations, legal proceedings, and ecclesiastical documents. Many of these sources are handwritten in Spanish or Nahuatl, requiring paleographic analysis to decipher their content.
I use Leo to transcribe and organize historical manuscripts, particularly difficult-to-read legal documents. Leo helps me generate initial transcriptions that I refine for accuracy, making it easier to analyze language patterns, identify recurring themes, and extract key historical insights.
Hi everyone, I’m a PhD candidate at Rice University.
I’m writing my dissertation on the environmental history of the Tijuca National Park, focusing on urban policies that use nature conservation to justify popular housing removal in mid-20th century Brazil. Although most of my sources are printed or typed, I also collected several 19th-century manuscripts written in Brazilian Portuguese, which will be part of my trial with Leo.
Hello!
I’m a 4th year DPhil in Early Modern History at Oxford. My thesis explores the perceptions of foreignness and national identity in EM Europe, by looking at the interactions of French and Italian courts in the sixteenth-century. The central case study is the marriage of Marie de Medici and Henry IV in 1600, and uses festival books, memoirs, planing documents, and especially diplomatic letters from all over Italy.
Since languages aren’t my strongest skills, and I am working with two that I am not fluent in, I can’t just scan texts quickly to get the gist. And most of the key references are just dropped into longer relations and accounts, meaning I have to look at everything. Transcribing documents is so time consuming, but I have to do many of my letters completely, in order to not miss the juicy tidbits. So I am hoping Leo can help me save time, and hopefully eventually help with some of the more difficult to understand hands.
Hi everyone, I’m a second year PhD student at Oxford. I work on challenges to to migration controls implemented in Britain and France, as well as their American colonies, during the Napoleonic Wars. I’m interested in how the attempt of governments to regulate migratory flows accommodated and was challenged by the actual movements of forced and free migrants and the advancement of their claims to rights and citizenship.
I work with lots of archival material in English and in French, mostly central and local government correspondence and reports about illegal activity, as well as petitions, complaints, and legal records. Most of these are in good condition but few are digitised, and the amount of irrelevant material in such files can cause problems and sifting for the relevant letters in a large box of correspondence is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I’ll use Leo to OCR these handwritten documents so that I can easily identify my key sources with keyword searches, massively increasing the source material available to me beyond what I would be able to find on my own.
Hello! I’m Noah; I’m an associate professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
For years I was a historian of early modern England and I felt like I could read everything I wanted to read, as quickly as I wanted to read them. But my interests have changed, and I am now working on much larger geographic, chronological and linguistic range, and it scares the hell out of me. For my current project, on book culture, I’m looking at archival material created in England, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Low Countries and the German lands from c1492-c1720.
Like everyone else, my language skills run on a continuum, from fluent to confident to shaky to minimal. But the real challenge is paleography: learning totally new hands for each area, time-period and set of materials is really, really time-consuming. And it’s even more difficult when my command of the language is not total.
So for me, I’m less interested in applying language processing or full-text searching to my images and more interested in getting access to content that I’ll know I’ll be interested in, faster. I’ll be supplying a lot of images from German and Italian archives, maybe some from Austria and France.
Hi everyone! I’m Clare, I’m a fourth year DPhil student at the University of Oxford. I work on sexual labour in the sixteenth century, specifically in Lyon, Seville and Mexico City. Under that umbrella, I work on legal prostitution, illegal sex work, transactional/survival sex, and on unfree sexual labour - and in doing so I consider histories of gender, sexuality and race, all through a labour lens to think about working conditions, relationships with the law and with managers and clients, and the way in which the practice of sexual labour changed over the sixteenth century.
My sources are a real variety. I use a lot of court documents, both secular and ecclesiastical, and the Inquisition is of course a major part of my source base. However, I also use censuses, municipal council records, law codes and notarial documents such as contracts and wills. It’s a real mix!
I’m really hoping Leo can help me wade through some of the longer documents, or decipher some of the municipal council minutes so I can find what I’m looking for more quickly. The handwriting on these in particular is extremely difficult, and familiarising myself with a new hand regularly is time consuming and exhausting. I have some trials that run to several hundred pages, and it would be great if Leo could help me get to grips with them much more quickly, so I can find the important passages without spending hours attempting to read every word.
Really looking forward to giving Leo a go, and hopefully finding a way through the reams of documents currently clogging my hard drive!
Hello everyone! I’m Maayan Aner, I’m a fourth year DPhil student at Oxford. My thesis, currently titled Queer Lives, Locality and Race in Counter-Reformation Spain, explores the social history of queerness in early modern Spain, spanning from 1500 to 1700. This study aims to uncover how Spanish society of the period understood and constructed non-normative sex and gender, examining the flexibility of sexual and gender norms and their intersection with other social categorisations and hierarchies.
Most of the manuscripts I use are legal proceedings from different Spanish legal systems, mainly the Inquisition and the royal courts. Their state of conservations varies wildly, some well preserved while others have water damage, ripped pages, holes etc. Quite a lot of it was recorded on cheap paper which means that the ink bled through, in other cases some of the ink was cheap and acidic and burned holes in the paper. Another issue that I often run into is that the scribes recorded the proceedings in real time, hurried, so their handwriting is barely legible. However that also varies significantly, often within the same documents.
Currently my use for Leo is transcription of such documents, as my own palaeography skills are quite lacking. I hope Leo helps me save time on this very time consuming task, and I hope to also learn how to use it for organising and searching my materials.
Hi everyone! My name is Asher. I’m currently an MPhil student at the University Cambridge, and I’ll be starting a PhD at Northwestern University in the fall. I study cross-cultural intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in the work of early modern Christian Hebraists. I am currently researching the German scholar Johann Christoph Wagenseil (1633-1705) and his study of Jewish law and custom. As an intellectual historian, I work most with printed materials. However, in order to reconstruct Wagenseil’s methods and intellectual network with Jews and Christians, I am also using written correspondence and marginalia. Since my manuscripts are in French, German, Italian, and Latin, I will eventually need to translate them; Leo’s transcription capabilities will help expedite that process by speedily producing searchable text.
Hi all! I’m Daan and I’m a PhD candidate in history at the University of York.
My research is on rats in the UK and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. At this time, brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) were introduced into Europe and slowly began supplanting the native black rat (Rattus rattus) population. Exactly how this happened, how people responded to it at the time, and what kind of impact it had on f.e. agriculture and the bubonic plague remains a bit of a mystery. Because rats are rarely mentioned in sources, I draw on a ton of different types of manuscripts to get a broad image of how people thought about and interacted with these furry little disruptors: court records, inventory books, expenditure books, correspondence, receipts… Honestly it’s probably easier to list the types I won’t be using! They’ll include Dutch and English sources, and perhaps a bit of French, German and Latin.
I hope to use Leo to help me sift through things like expenditure books to find mentions of rats, as well as court records about damages to find and transcribe ones that are particularly related to rats, essentially to save me the time of spending a few days looking through giant books myself. It’ll also help me transcribe letters, ship journals and… the list goes on! I hope it’ll be a huge time saver.
Hello everyone! My name is Josh Anthony, and I’m a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History Department at Rutgers University. I’ve held fellowships with the Hispanic Society and Dumbarton Oaks and currently hold a Vault Associate fellowship with The Americas.
My dissertation is titled “Amaquemecan’s Royal Relations: An Indigenous Family History of the Aztec and Spanish Empires in Early Mexico.” I use the Nahuatl annals and other sources to tell the history of one Nahua family that ruled the town of Amaquemecan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I explore how these Indigenous leaders navigated their conquest by the Aztecs, the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the rise of Spanish rule, and Christian evangelization. I argue that Nahuas continued to use kin-based politics to negotiate the meaning of colonialism, even as the Nahua family transformed dramatically across the sixteenth century. You can read more about my work at my website (which I desperately need to update): https://josh-anthony.com/.
I work primarily with Nahuatl and Spanish manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries, a mix of colonial state documents and histories written by Indigenous intellectuals and notaries. The Spanish manuscripts actually tend to be harder to decypher for me - some of these scribes had terrible handwriting! Using Leo to help transcribe the paleography would be a massive aid as I complete my dissertation. Having many transcribed documents in one word-searchable database also would be a game-changer.
Thank you Jon and Jack for this exciting opportunity. And Rebeca, we should talk some time, your work sounds super exciting. I also believe we have a few colleagues in common!
Hi folks - I am a Junior Research Fellow in African History at Trinity College, Cambridge. I received my PhD last year from Stanford. My book manuscript looks at the entangled legal and environmental history of a forest region that straddles the border of present-day Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea (Conakry). I have published more broadly on histories of colonial and Islamic law, migrant labor, and slavery and its afterlives across West Africa. Most of my archival materials are handwritten 19th and 20th century French and Arabic with a scattering of documents in German, Italian, and Latin. (Although I know Leo - for now! - won’t work for the Arabic.)
I’m using Leo to begin thinking about my second book project, which will be based on a trove of court cases I photographed in local archives across western Côte d’Ivoire during fieldwork in 2021-2022. I have nearly 50,000 images (roughly 85,000 pages) of documents to sift through. These documents are almost entirely in French and date from roughly 1940 to 1990. Being able to search the records quickly would allow me to pick out themes with a density of evidence without having to actually read 85,000 pages!
Hi everyone, I am a PhD candidate at Rice University.
I am writing my dissertation on the regime led by Victor Hugues that ruled revolutionary Guadeloupe during the Age of Revolution, focusing on the impact it had in the Lesser Antilles and the larger Atlantic World. All of my sources are handwritte, so this Leo trial would be extremely useful.
I’m Natalie, a second-year D.Phil. student at the University of Oxford and co-convener of the Oxford Seminar in Irish History.
My research focuses on the intersections of the imperial, national, religious, class, and gender identities of Irishmen who participated in 19th-century British Royal Navy polar expeditions. I have already completed an M.Phil. focusing on the identities of Irish naval officers, and I am now expanding the breadth of my focus to include Irish seamen and marines as well.
Most of my primary sources are handwritten, from personal letters home to official naval records like muster rolls and logbooks. For a number of reasons, these sources are not always written in the neatest hand: even the most literate aboard a ship–the officers–usually left school at 13; supply and standardization issues meant that sources are sometimes written on irregular scraps of paper; and the tossing of a ship in heavy weather is simply not conducive to elegant penmanship even for the most talented scribe.
At the moment, I plan on using Leo to transcribe ships’ logs. I have been reading the logs of every ship involved in a 19th-century polar expedition to find instances in which a punishment has been carried out against a member of the crew. With this information I hope to determine whether there were any differences in severity, frequency, or cause of punishment for the crew depending on their nationality. However, each polar expedition usually lasted several years and involved more than one ship, resulting in thousands of pages of log entries to comb through. With Leo’s transcriptions, I aim to create a searchable text database to expedite this process.
In the future, I would also like to use Leo to transcribe muster rolls. Currently, it tends to start hallucinating when faced with transcribing tables, but hopefully this issue will be resolved in future versions.
Hello! I’m Ben and I’m in the third year of my PhD at NYU.
My research concerns the history of “gamification” in modern Britain. A critique normally associated with our digital present, I’m interested in uncovering the ways in which “gamification,” or making life more like a game, was actually an aspiration for different nineteenth- and twentieth-century actors. From parliamentary politics to workplace management, from military strategy to brain science, games were introduced as a model, metaphor, or practice of a certain type of order.
I intend to use Leo’s transcription feature to decipher the famously Delphic handwriting of one of my game metaphorists, HLA Hart. Hart’s personal archive includes a treasure-trove of diaries, workbooks, and marginalia but his scrawl is often illegible to my eye. I’ve already had some success with Leo in this task and I’m excited to help with the development of such a promising research tool.
Hello all, My name is Antonio, and I’m doing a PhD in Oxford. I work mainly on diplomatic and political history. My research focuses on conspiracies and regime change in 16th Century Italy. I work mainly with manuscript sources in Italian, French, Latin and Spanish.
