Hi all! My name is Logan, I’m a 3rd year PhD student at Rice.
I am an ethnohistorian researching the Indian Slave Trade out of Charleston and into the Caribbean, particularly Bermuda. I am trying to recover enslaved Indigenous people in diaspora in the Caribbean and am arguing that the Atlantic economy was significantly more Indigenous than historians have traditionally given it credit for.
I work primarily with trade and legal documents from archives across the Eastern US, the Caribbean, and the UK, though the availability of source material means that I really work with whatever mentions my historical subjects. Most of these documents are in English, but there are Spanish-language sources I would like to access at some point. Like you all, the script in my documents range from genuinely beautiful near-calligraphy to almost indecipherable–you can imagine which Leo will be put to work most in.
Hi, I’m Heather McIntyre. I’m a PhD candidate in history at the University Toronto. My research is about print culture in Anglican missions to Indigenous communities, throughout what’s now Canada. It investigates the production and spread of missionary books, then uses case studies to examine how books were received in different contexts - in particular, I am investigating how the Book of Common Prayer was used to solidify military alliance between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the British, and the role of hymnals in creating the unique hymn-singing tradition of the Muskegowuk nation. I also hope that the database of Anglican-produced books which I compiled from library catalogues, bibliographies, and primary sources will provide a useful catalogue for researchers interested in book history or language revitalization.
The manuscripts I’m using especially include missionaries’ records, since they sometimes show which books missionaries worked on or ordered. It involves sifting through a large number of records that don’t have directly related information, so I’m interested in using Leo to make them searchable and find mentions of translation and book distribution. I’m thrilled to be part of the beta!
Hi there,
I’m Alberto. I’ve recently earned my Ph.D in History at UPenn and I’m currently a Howard S. Marks postdoctoral fellow, also at UPenn.
My research, which intersects the disciplines of Economics, Law, Business Studies and History, focuses on exploring how to write business history through litigation records. Specifically, I reconstruct histories of early 19th century global merchants, bankers and their companies by using the records of the legal processes they faced. The court records that I’ve explored the most so far are those of the Court of Chancery in England, although I also use manuscripts from other English, Spanish, and French courts.
I want to use Leo to organize the information of my archival documents, including notary records and private correspondence, but mostly to transcribe legal manuscripts that are otherwise hard to handle physically.
Hello everyone. I’m Olav Sigmundstad, a fourth-year PhD candidate at Cambridge University, where I’m investigating arbitrary power and the rule of law during the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods in England. I am particularly interested in how the English medieval constitutional tradition and Protestant theology affected the way in which the English conceptualized legitimate government.
My research is in part rooted in unpublished manuscript sources, encompassing political and legal treatises, as well as transcripts from parliamentary debates and court arguments.
As my submission deadline approaches, I find myself with a substantial backlog of manuscripts waiting to be transcribed. This is where Leo can potentially be a game-changer, significantly expediting the transcription process. By harnessing Leo’s capabilities, I hope to streamline my research workflow and ensure a thorough exploration of these crucial primary sources.
I’m excited about the possibilities that Leo offers in enhancing the efficiency (and perhaps also the accuracy) of the transcription process.
Hi everyone I’m Beshouy a fourth year PhD candidate in History at Yale working on histories of science and sexuality in Egypt and the Maghreb. I am still collecting sources some of which are typed, others are in Arabic and others I have yet to locate. I plan to use Leo to work through some court cases I collected which involve lengthy transcripts of proceedings, interrogations and letters, mostly in French. Paleography is time consuming and though I fear I may be losing out one some of the learning that comes with archival research, of learning to recognize a court clerk’s hand and getting deeply familiar with the stylistic elements of a set of texts, I am hoping to save time as I work through lots of material and figure out what else I need to gather in local archives next year.
Greetings, all! My name is Christian, and I am an American DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford.
My research is a diplomatic history of how Austro-Prussian relations evolved before and after the Austro-Prussian War, with a particular emphasis on the perceptions of both countries’ diplomats on the matter of German Dualism and the German Question. Most of my time involves reading through letters, dossiers, and other such writings from such diplomats between 1848 and 1879, so I’m happy to see what a program like Leo has to offer.
I can currently read through my source documents at a pace of 300-500 words per hour, depending on how quickly I get a headache, but with a program like Leo, it’s possible for those numbers to be further improved. I suppose figuring that out is what a beta test is for.
hi all, I’m Marco, doing a DPhil in History at Oxford. My research is on the Venetian Republic in the 16th and 17th century, looking at surveillance and intelligence practices in different areas of the Venetian empire. I work with formal and informal letters, registers of Senate minutes, and other handrwitten notes, in Italian and sometimes Latin. This platform seems very usefull for storing and organising archival material, and I’m curious to test the accuracy of the transcription tool also!
Hi everyone! I’m Michaela, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford working on a thesis re-examing the French Revolution through the lens of subjectivity. My thesis uses uses over 60 diaries written by ordinary people in Revolutionary France to explore how they understood the experience of living through revolutionary changes as personally meaningful, and how it transformed various dimensions of their identities.
Many of the diaries I study come from people at the lower end of the class structure. This is both exciting, because it introduces voices that have often been silenced, and challenging, because these documents are often particularly tricky to read on account of low paper quality, very small writing to conserve ink and paper, phonetic spelling, and uncertain handwriting from authors who weren’t used to writing much. I’m hoping that Leo will help me decipher these sources, and counteract the historians’ bias to rely more on upperclass voices because they are easier to access!
Hi everybody! I’m a 3rd year history PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. My research is focused on Late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, looking to private British imperial networks. In particular, I am interested in the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British cartographical organization that represents a merger of evangelical religious interests, British imperial motives, and pursued early Zionist settlement of the country.
Many of my archival sources are handwritten correspondences between various surveyors and government officials, and their handwriting is absolutely shocking. I’d love for Leo to be of some help in deciphering some of these sources. I’m also hoping Leo can assist in organizing the large amount of material I’ve gathered. Very much looking forward to giving it a shot and collaborating!
Hi! I’m Morgan, a PhD student at Rice University. I am studying African American perceptions of Native American identity in the United States and how they changed over time. This project requires the use of legal documents, newspapers, and personal narratives, which I will use Leo to transcribe when needed.
Hi all,
I am Saha. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. My primary research areas are the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and the transnational connections between Germany and South Asia. In my dissertation, I am exploring how people, ideologies, and ideas circulated and entangled together between Germany and South Asia during the interwar years and the Second World War.
I plan to use Leo mainly for handwritten documents in English and German, which can be challenging to read with many varied styles and forms of handwritings and documents that are in the German fraktur font style - which can also be challenging many times.
I have used Leo with both kinds of documents, and it was able to recognize the characters perfectly, even those words that were struck out by the author or added between the lines in handwritten documents.
Hi everyone, I am Austin Collins, and I am postdoc fellow at Tübingen University in Germany.
I am a historian of early modern European history, with a specialization in urban, religious, and spatial approaches. My research investigates how monarchical and religious influence interacted with civic authority within urban spaces during the early French Wars of Religion. My current book project, based on my doctoral dissertation and provisionally entitled ‘’ La ville eut l’éphémère honneur d’être comme la capitale du Royaume ‘: A Spatial History of Charles IX’s Royal Tour of France, 1564–1566 (Angoulême, Lyon, Sens)’, explores how royal, civic, and religious actors utilized different urban spaces in France to project their own authority and promote religious Toleration and co-existence through royal entrances amid religious warfare. My research incorporates primary source material such as festival books, financial records, correspondences, city council minutes, and maps. Prior to Tübingen, I have taught early modern European seminars at Durham University.
I mostly work with archival sources from sixteenth-century France, such as city council minutes, correspondances, and financial records.c
Hello everyone! I’m Ksenia, a PhD Candidate at UChicago in History. I work on the history of teacher training and education reform in the early 19th century British Empire. I work with a lot of personal and official correspondence as well as various institutional records, autobiographies, common-place books, parliamentary debates and reports and commissions etc.
I plan to use Leo to transcribe my documents and to help me organize my notes/photographs/transcriptions which currently exist in various folders and backups and hard-drives.
Hi all, my name is Chao. I recently received my PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Looking forward to the experience, and many thanks to Jon.
Hello all, I’m a 2nd year DPhil candidate at Oxford. My work looks at the spread of the German Peasants’ War from a spatial perspective, focusing on social spaces (especially taverns) where unrest spread. All of my sources are in German. Many thanks to Jon for organising this. Looking forward to getting started.
Hi everyone! I’m Bas and I’m a third-year PhD student at the University of St Andrews, working on diplomacy and news in England and the Dutch Republic in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.
My research involves looking at plenty of printed sources (both textual and visual ones) but also a lot of manuscript material in the form of diplomatic dispatches from London and The Hague in English, Dutch and French. Whilst I’m able to deal with English material, my Dutch and French paleography is a lot less developed and so I’m hoping to use Leo to effectively and efficiently transcribe Dutch and French material and provide a storage place for this!
Hello everyone! I’m Jingyang, and I’m now a 2nd-year PhD candidate at the history department of the University of Warwick. I’m working on the diets of the poor in 18th- and 19th-century England, including their dietary realities and discourses/debates. I primarily work with poor relief and charity records, parliamentary reports, newspapers, cookbooks, medical reports, manuscripts and dairies.
I’m excited to use Leo for transcribing and organising historical texts, especially those with difficult handwriting or complex formatting. It’s been a valuable tool for making archival sources more accessible and searchable for my research. Looking forward to connecting with fellow researchers here!
Hi Everyone, my name is Mishka, I’m a PhD student at Princeton and working on the history of psychiatry in colonial South Africa. I am using Leo mostly to transcribe hand-written case records from 19th-century psychiatric casebooks. I’m still in the prospectus stage so my topic is developing, but I’m hoping to examine the history of hysteria diagnoses among a multi-racial population in South African asylums. Thanks for including me here!
My name is Laura Newman Eckstein. I am a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania where I work on the Jewish press mid-nineteenth-century United States. My dissertation argues that the Jewish press was as much as business enterprise as it was a cultural one. I specifical examine the use of Hebrew typography, publishing networks, and advertising to make my argument.
My day job is as a curator of Judaica Digital Humanities at the Penn Libraries.
In my work and in my dissertation, I use all different types of documents including letters, manuscripts, scrapbooks, reports, and of course newspapers.
I hope to use Leo to bring together a large corpus of materials including letters and ephemera that relate to the mid-nineteenth-century United States Jewish newspaper industry. I hope to make this searchable and easy to categorize with AI.