Hi everyone, I’m Andy, a 3rd year PhD candidate in History at Harvard. I’m writing my dissertation on middle Byzantine social and economic history, particularly the sorts of techniques and financial instruments families of different backgrounds used to manage their wealth and the different ways they passed wealth down to future generations (or didn’t). I also have a side project on the management of the patrimony of the early Roman church. I’m hoping Leo can help with transcription of old/badly photographed critical editions and secondary source material in medieval and modern Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian, and Italian. I might also have some handwritten marginalia to decipher.
2 Likes
Hi, everyone. It is wonderful to e-meet you all!
I am a second-year Yale history PhD student. My research compares attempts to forge interoceanic corridors in the Americas. In particular, I am interested in the complex consequences of these efforts to control tropical and polar environments.
I primarily work with documents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I seek to look at documents in Spanish, English, French, and Danish. I am excited to start using Leo to help me get through some handwritten manuscripts I had trouble reading before. I look forward to see how this new platform could help me improve my project.
Thank you again for inviting me to this unique opportunity. I cannot wait for the next steps!
2 Likes
Hiya! My name is Anna Bruins and I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Warwick. My research focuses on the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and the kind of natural knowledge acquired and circulated by those who travelled with in it’s network. I am specifically interested in the place of bioprospecting (the practice of studying nature with economic purposes in mind, eg. through (trans)plantation) within the larger commercial ambitions of the Company throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Paying special attention to concepts such as “ownership”, “value” and “progress”, my aim is to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the roots of plantation industries in the early modern period.
In my research, I will make use of a range of different kinds of (Dutch-language) travel writing: primarily journals, but also letters, reports, and publications. Fortunately for me, the VOC has left a massive archive. I am hoping a service such as Leo will help me navigate as much archival material as possible, and make the most out of the time that I have for this project. In addition, I am generally interested in AI developments and what they may bring our discipline in the future, and I look forward to participating in this process as a beta tester.
2 Likes
Hi all! My name is Farah Bazzi and I am a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. My research explores the intersections of environmental thought, race, human mobility, and settlement practices, with a focus on the expulsion of the Moriscos and their socio-environmental impact across the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire. For my research, I look at various documents, such as land records, diplomatic correspondences, judicial documents, and agricultural manuals written in Ottoman, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English. I plan to use Leo to organize my archive of documents written in the Latin alphabet. It would be great if Leo would allow be able to assist me in reading some of my sources!
2 Likes
Hello! I’m a history PhD candidate at Princeton specializing in financial history, and a contributing editor at the Financial Times.
I work with merchant and retail ledgers to try to recreate a picture of financial habits in late colonial and early-Republic America. I’d like to be able to read ledgers in table form, which I understand might be possible in the next iteration of Leo. In the meantime I’m working on something surprisingly similar to Jon Cooper: reading letters in late 17th-century England to see how the guinea, a coin meant to be a dividend payment for the Royal African Company, came to be seen as a unit of account for investment during England’s financial revolution.
2 Likes
Hello everyone! I’m PhD student at UC Berkeley History Dept. I do comparative project exploring People’s Houses in the Russian Empire/USSR and Italy in the 1880s—1920s. For political education and cultured leisure, People’s Houses usually included theatre, educational and art circles, literary and musical evenings, a library, and political clubs associated with left-wing movements. The organizational model of the People’s House was widely adopted, giving rise to other following organizations: early Soviet mass cultural-educational institutions of a club type (Dom Kul’tury) and fascist National Afterwork Club (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro). I reveal the role of these institutions as the foundation of cultural continuity during crucial periods.
During my BA, MA and doctoral program in Russia, I worked with a variety of archival documents such as letters (handwritten and typed), minutes and bylaws of some cultural organizations, party documents, notes from officials to various organizations, and so on in the time span of 1850-s—1920s. Now I’m focusing on archives of People’s Houses that existed in Saint Petersburg in 1890s—1917.
I would like to use Leo to OCR my sources to facilitate the note-making process. Previously, I had to type some important manuscripts while being in the archive; of course it was very time consuming. As I have to process a lot of documents to gather some statistic data I need to search a lot through these manuscripts, and Leo helps me with that.
2 Likes
Breanna Moore, 6th year PhD history candidate at UPenn https://www.history.upenn.edu/node/13163
My fields are African American history, the transAtlantic slave trade, and comparative slavery.
My research interests include reparations, emancipation, and abolition in the African diaspora. My dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the disparities in indemnities distributed by Britain to Western powers and African sovereigns for slave trade abolition compliance from 1807 to the 1884 Berlin Conference. I document and examine the moral and legal discourses surrounding redress and compensation for liberated African recaptives and African sovereigns in West Africa. Britain made nearly two hundred anti-slave trade treaties during the era of slave trade abolition. The treaties, legal instruments used to codify indemnities, represent a significant body of legal activity that recalibrated the global order at the end of the slave trade. My scholarship illuminates the material circumstances and political consequences of Britain’s slave trade suppression campaign in the nineteenth century.
I work with 19th century manuscripts.
I’ll use Leo for transcription.
3 Likes
Dear All,
I’m a third year PhD student in the History department at UC Berkeley. I am interested in the relationship between religion and time during the English Reformation. When my research involves manuscripts, I will be working with 16th and 17th century ones in English secretary and italic hands.
3 Likes
Hi everyone,
I’m Noga, a PhD student at Harvard History, currently in my fourth year and conducting research at the Archivo de Indias in Spain. My dissertation topic is Royal slavery in the Spanish empire, mostly Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico regions, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. I work with various types of documents, but mostly administrative correspondence. I plan to use Leo as an aid in transcribing documents, hoping it will speed up the process. Thanks for the opportunity to be here and make use of this program.
3 Likes
Hello all! I am Declan, a first year PhD candidate in legal history at Cambridge. My research concerns review by central common law courts of borough jurisdiction in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
As part of this research, I am examining court records (such as, for example, the plea rolls of King’s Bench) as well as manuscript reports of cases. The former are usually in Latin, the latter in Law French or English. These are the two types of documents which I hope to use Leo to transcribe. Given the mass of material (especially as concerns court records) text-searchability will be of great assistance.
I am looking forward to contributing to this exciting project!
3 Likes
Hi All! I am Yipeng, a second-year PhD student in history at the University of Michigan. My current research interests focus on the history of metal mining in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, especially in four regions: the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the South Caucasus (Armenia, in particular). More broadly I’m interested in economic history, environmental history, historical GIS, and the history of capitalism and socialism.
My sources range from 18th-century Russian manuscripts to Soviet-era handwritings and they vary a great deal visually. I’d love to try Leo to decipher these documents and see how much it can do. Thanks very much for introducing me to this project again!
2 Likes
Hi everyone, My name is Rachel Eu, and I am a PhD candidate in the history department at Princeton. My dissertation explores municipal finance in New York City during the late 19th century, paying particular attention to the transition from using special assessments to municipal bonds to fund infrastructure projects. I plan to use Leo primarily to transcribe handwritten municipal documents, reports, and correspondence.
2 Likes
Hi everyone,
My name is Will, and I am a first-year DPhil student at Oxford. My research focuses on the Hanseatic League’s merchants in sixteenth-century London. I am interested in their social networks and the extent to which they engaged with London society. They lived in the Steelyard, which was the London outpost of the Hansa. Through a thorough analysis of surviving archival evidence, I hope to reconstruct the lives and networks of the Hanse merchants who operated out of London during the sixteenth century.
Leo would be an invaluable tool for this project, particularly in reviewing legal and ecclesiastical documents (some in Latin), correspondence (English and German), and other primary materials that could assist in locating the merchants of the Steelyard.
2 Likes
Hello all,
My name is Matt. I’m an assistant prof. in the history department at UMass Amherst, working broadly on modern Britain/British Empire. My current project is on the East India Company and the opium trade in Asia from the mid-18th to the mid-19th c. I’ve been using Leo for transcription purposes and have found it really useful so far - excited to see what else I can do with it!
2 Likes
Hello Everyone!
My name is Amrish Nair and I’m a PhD candidate in the Dept. of History at John’s Hopkins. My dissertation, “Repentant Renegades in an Age of Confessional Crisis," examines how early modern Spain responded to repentant renegades - Christians who converted to Islam while abroad and arrived on Spanish soil seeking reintegration into Catholic society. This project combines Inquisition sources, the institutions that handled trials related to renegades, chronicles of captivity in the Islamic world, and printed pamphlets related to the question of apostasy to Islam.
The handwritten sources I study are materials related to the Spanish Inquisition – trials, trial summaries, and bureaucratic materials. The scribal hands for these sources changed each year and they can either be very easy to read or nearly impossible. That is where Leo will help. I am hoping to use Leo to help transcribe difficult scribal hands and to help gather quantitative data related to Inquisitorial judgements and punishments.
2 Likes
Hello everyone!
My name is Qiong, and I am a second-year PhD student in the History Department at William & Mary. My research focuses on U.S. mercantile engagement with the Qing Empire’s Thirteen Factories from the 1750s to the 1840s. One of the central aims of my work is to explore the transculturation of economic ideas, cultural artifacts, and social practices that emerged during the early U.S.-China trade.
My research primarily involves analyzing 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts related to early U.S.-China trade. I wish Leo could assist me in transcribing the cursive handwriting in these documents. This would not only help me better understand the material but also save me time in my research process.
2 Likes
Hi all, my name is Ben Breen and I’m an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. I work on the history of science, medicine and technology and early modern world history. I’m interested in testing this tool on manuscripts written between roughly 1600 and 1900. In particular I am curious to see how it does with documents written in cursives hands of the 17th and 18th centuries especially in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Latin, but I’ll probably also be using it to speed up transcription of some easier but still not that easy diaries and letters written in English in the 1860-1900 period.
3 Likes
My name is Adam Forsyth; I am a second year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, although (like several people in here) I used to be at Stanford. I study the history of English law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and related topics in administrative, ecclesiastical, political, and intellectual history, and in the history of the book during the same period.
Other interests of mine include, variously, eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British and American rational dissenting Unitarianism; the history of the book during other periods and in other places (including the history of the book trade, comparative codicology, and of scribal and printing technologies beyond the book); the history of collecting, especially in Song dynasty China; the history of Sinology, especially in its French and Russian aspects; and more.
My primary research programme at the moment is largely (if not almost entirely) based upon annoying unpublished manuscript material in a variety of formats. Rarely such material might include, e.g., a professionally compiled learned treatise in a clear and regular hand, but more regularly it consists of ecclesiastical court records (act books, cause papers, etc.) written messily in a mixture of often unhelpfully abbreviated Latin and English, ecclesiastical precedent books, messy correspondence, legal commonplaces in law French and Latin and other weird, chaotic sets of learned notes, Exchequer records of bonds and forfeitures, and many many other membranaceous documents of the varied but usually unwieldy types that continue to hurt countless backs in the map room of the PRO.
I also sometimes encounter ancient Greek and Hebrew but I invariably ask for help with those. Occasionally while dabbling in seventeenth century material I have also encountered shorthands that I keep meaning to try to figure out.
I like to read my documents with as much care as possible, line by line, but occasionally I am looking for a needle in a genuine haystack, and sometimes I can’t remember where an interesting reference in my photographic archive is actually located. So I am hoping that the transcriptions Leo will help me locate long-forgotten, buried acorns and especially to help me index certain bodies of court records case-by-case.
2 Likes
Hi everyone! I’m currently Associate Professor of History at Stanford, working mostly on the European Middle Ages. I work on a wide range of manuscript materials from ca. 1100-ca. 1500, mostly written in Latin, ranging from nice-and-tidy bookhands to gnarly notarial scrawls. Much of my recent manuscript-based work has focused on local church records, but my earlier work focused on commercial records and I might find my way back to these at some point…
As part of a long-running DH project that I lead (Corpus Synodalium) I have also gathered a large trove of early modern printed works (gain, mostly in Latin, from 1470-1700ish) concerning church law, many of which have now been manually transcribed but some of which remain to be tackled.
I’d love to use Leo to generate rough transcriptions of the sources I look at, which can then be reviewed by me or other good Latinists/paleographers, rather than doing the whole thing from scratch.
3 Likes
Hey Rowan! What are the chances of expanding the Corpus Syndodalium into the 16th and 17th centuries…? We could really use it.