Just getting to 1500 might kill me - though I might one day try to push the dataset up to the Council of Trent… Any further, though, and one would need someone who actually understands the landscape of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and that’s definitely not me!
Hi everyone. I’m an academic at the University of Cambridge. I am working on early modern Italian/Latin materials relating to the history of philosophy and political thought - especially in southern Italy. I’m also interested in early modern English-language documents, such as the Journals and manuscripts of the philosopher John Locke.
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Hi everyone man name is James Cullis. My project seeks to explore the way in which debates around physical matter and material forces arose in seventeenth century natural law. In particular, it concentrates on the Anglo-Dutch context and the works of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Cumberland,Samuel Parker and John Locke. Doing so, it also seeks to argue that traditional approaches to the history of political thought, stressing the role of language and rhetoric, have overlooked the crucial role played by physical materiality. In the process, it will argue that physical concerns play a significant factor within broader intellectual history. Before coming to Oxford, I completed a Mphil at Sussex University entitled ‘Landscapes of Progress: The Place of Physical Geography in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of Stadial Theory’. The thesis highlighted the role played by the physical terrain in explanations of historical progress outlined in the work of four stadial theorists. In addition to this, I became interested in the way the Humanities disciplines engages with questions surrounding Climate Change and co-edited volume entitled: Climate Change and the Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental Crises.
My interest in leo is really related to understanding the historiographical significance of edition and exploring the historical context of production.
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What a wonderful opportunity you have with those records! Can’t wait to see your work published!
Hello,
My name is Paul Cheney. I’m a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. In the past I have generally worked on eighteenth-century topics connected to the problem of economic globalization in the early modern world and, in particular, France’s role in this process. (My last book was a plantation-level study of a sugar plantation in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). I also research and write as an intellectual historian of political economy and the social sciences more generally, but the archival dimension of this work is much less marked. My work in economic and imperial history makes uses of archival sources such as administrative correspondence and memoirs, notarial records, private correspondence, plantation records and vital records. All of this could have benefited from automated record transcription. I am now working on a twentieth-century topic–the biography of a French historian of the French Antilles. It draws on thousands of pages of correspondence from all over the world from the 1930s to the 1990s, some of it type written, though most of it hand written. I’m hoping that transcription facilitates this work by speeding up the reading of the document and also making the correspondence searchable.
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Hi Everyone!
I’m Justin Clark, a Senior Lecturer in History at Cornell University. I was previously Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. My first book, City of Second Sight (UNC Press 2018) examined the culture of spectatorship in 19th-century Boston. I relied predominantly on printed sources and images. My current project looks at the relationship between time and the law in the early U.S. republic. This time, I’m using a lot more handwritten legal documents – legal correspondence, wills, manumission papers, and other such sources – and I hope Leo will help me process these faster. I’m not sure how Leo will organize my documents, but since I index these documents in Zotero, I may simply copy the Leo transcriptions to client notes attached to the original images in the Zotero library. I’ll update everyone as the project moves along.
Cheers,
Justin Clark
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I’m an early modern historian currently looking at the Remonstrants’ archive
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Hi all,
I’m Mabel Winter and I am currently a postdoctoral research associate on an AHRC project, ‘The Politics of the English Grain Trade, 1315-1815’. I’m a socio-economic historian and alongside the grain trade project I am currently writing a short book about Goldsmith Banking in England from the seventeenth century onwards.
I have always worked with legal records, particularly from the English equity courts of Chancery and Exchequer, so a language barrier is never a problem because they are all written in English. However, these records are vast – bills and answers alone can be thousands of words and multiple pages and depositions further increase word count. In my current project, I have a database of over 1200 of these legal cases concerning grain mills. Whilst I have done manual transcription of parts there is so much more to be transcribed, and Leo will hopefully be able to help me with this! Like others, I’m looking for speed and covering more material. I’m also interested to see how Leo fares on these long and often faded/ripped documents. Hopefully it will help me to find more material for a book project and potentially a follow-on project.
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Hello all, I teach British and European history at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. I’m presently working on a book about alchemy in British and American popular culture in the long 19th century. Most of my sources are newspaper articles, which I’m hoping to use Leo to help me transcribe, with some archival correspondence here and there. Right now I’m working through a set of letters to and from a Scottish chemist who both wrote about and experimented on alchemy in the 1840s, and soon I will be gathering diary entries by a US army officer-turned-collector and writer on early-modern alchemical books.
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Hi all, I’m a recent PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh. My research is concerned with enslaved healthcare, medicine, and everyday life in the British Caribbean (specifically British Guiana and Trinidad) in the era of amelioration/abolition. My dissertation analysed incredibly rich legal documents consisting of the complaints of hundreds of enslaved people, focusing on their experiences of different types of health concerns including injury, disease, disability, and childbirth.
I’ll be using Leo to transcribe these handwritten legal documents in order to build a searchable database for scholars and other types of researchers all over the world, most especially those in the Caribbean.
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I’m a research professor (History & American Studies) at the University of Virginia leading a project that supports our descendant (of those enslaved at the institution) organization in continuing research to identify the names of those enslaved here. My project also continues to digitize, transcribe, and make publicly accessible the documentation related to enslavement and understands descendancy and enslaved communities as not delimited by geography (per our descendant organization’s wishes–we co-steward the project with them). Thus, the larger goal is to identify by name and “map” our regional enslaved population over time (we currently do XML tagging on every document as part of the expansion of a relational database linked to the digital archive, tracking dates, people, event, and place down to the granular level). We have scanned over 14,000 county court documents to date, as well as letters, diaries, journals, ledgers, account books, bills of sale, and the like. The project is also educational, so always involves undergraduates as research assistants and graduate research fellows. I am very interested in the ways in which AI/Leo can facilitate speedier and more accurate transcription. I am eager to see how Leo will help us get through many thousands of documents far more quickly as we expand a digital humanities project, educate our students, and create a public good for descendant communities.
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Hi everyone! My name is Carlotta Wright De La Cal, and I’m a Ph.D. candidate in History at UC Berkeley. I research the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, with particular attention to the role of industrial corporations in shaping labor migration, legal regimes, and racialized community formation from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. My dissertation examines how railroad companies influenced the movement of people, goods, and authority across national and Indigenous boundaries, especially in the context of expanding federal power, labor disputes, and shifting immigration policy. I primarily work with sources in English and Spanish from the 1880s to the 1930s, including personnel records, correspondence, immigration files, government reports, and company documents. These tend to be typewritten, but in the earlier periods many are handwritten and their legibility varies widely, especially for meeting minutes. I’m really interested in using Leo to transcribe these materials quickly and accurately, with the hope of building a searchable, multilingual digital archive that I can tag, annotate, and word-search to find key passages while writing.
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I teach history at UC Berkeley. I’m working on a book called Means of Destruction, about how the movement of guns and ammunition shaped relations of power and domination across the Americas during the long 19th century. I’m interested in seeing how Leo can help me process the archival material I’ve collected over the past decade from archives in the US, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. I’m also eager to see if it can help me work with a large volume of quantitative information recorded in hand-written registers from the U.S. War Department and from a major arms-dealing firm.
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Hi everyone! I’m a Junior Research Fellow in History at Merton College, Oxford. I received my PhD last year from Yale. I’m a historian of modern Latin America, focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. My research examines the relationship between archaeological excavations, state formation, and the nationalization of subsoil resources. I plan to use Leo to work through a corpus of petitions and legal records from Mexico City’s municipal archive.
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Hi all,
My name is Christian Robles-Baez, I am a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford. In my doctoral dissertation, I am studying the emergence of the global coffee market, particularly examining the commercial exchange between Brazil and the U.S. I am interested in transcribing different types of reports and letters in English and Portuguese. I think the main goal for using Leo is converting manuscripts into text, which will enable for example textual analysis, networks, correlations, and other types of studies.
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Hi all! My name is Daniel Rodriguez, and I’m an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. I’m working on my second book, which will be about the lives of poor children in the wake of abolition in Cuba, but I’m also doing a side (or parallel) project on crime and punishment and race in 19th century Cuba.
My first book, on the politics of health in early 20th century Cuba, was (thankfully) based mostly on type-written archival and printed materials, but now that I’m moving back into the nineteenth century, those colonial scribes are really making it hard for me. For the period of this beta test, I’ll be mostly looking at documents from the Archive Histórico Nacional in Madrid–19th century reports on the causes of non-white criminality in Cuba as well as some longer files about Chinese indentured workers, indulto petitions, and reports on prison reform. I’ll be using Leo to help transcribe some of these longer documents–all of which have multiple scribes of varying legibility.
I’m really looking forward to getting a little assistance with these documents. Happy researching, y’all!
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My name is Sheilagh Ogilvie and I’m a professor of economic history at All Souls College Oxford. I am writing a book about European serfdom and also carrying out micro-level research on how the “second serfdom” worked for unfree peasants in early modern Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). I have copies of a number of volumes of landlord responses to serf petitions from a feudal estate in northern Bohemia, which are handwritten in German using Kurrentschrift. I have hand-transcribed these from 1650 to 1730, leaving the final decade from 1730 to 1740 still to be done. I am curious to see how well Leo works with these early modern Bohemian sources.
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Hi all!
I’m Caitlin - I’m a professional genealogist and historian who has worked in the family history field for over 13 years. My academic background is in the fields of Anthropology and History, with a focus in Genocide Studies, and my professional work focuses in the Jewish world.
My work ranges from testifying as a genealogical expert in legal cases, assisting with citizenship claims, assisting with restoration of lost art and property, family histories, institutional histories, and just about anything else you can think of- I’ve even advised on a number of books!
I work on documents spanning from the medieval era to now; the languages I work in are primarily Russian, Polish, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, and Latin, with additional work in French, Italian, Ukrainian, Ladino, Arabic, and Portuguese. Documents can be anything from a handwritten record from the Spanish Inquisition to a typed internal memo from a Ghetto during the Holocaust. I work with notary records, vital records, wills and estate files, graves, letters, and pretty much anything else that a person could have left behind.
I’m using Leo mainly for my personal research- I’m working on a method of tracing a wider community using the sort of intensive consanguinity that is present in certain communities I work in and am descended from. The organizational tools in particular are invaluable for my purposes. This sort of work is literally never done, so being able to approach these documents from a new angle is extremely helpful. Transcriptions are so useful to be able to search large numbers of documents, and being able to date and tag them lets me try and approach different networks of people and communities in new ways.
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Hi folks. I’m Mark Hailwood, an early modern historian at the University of Bristol. I use court depositions from 16th and 17th century England to examine various apsects of everyday rural life. I primarily work with county level quarter sessions records, and diocesan church court records, both of which contain huge numbers of depositions, but very little of this has been digitised or transcribed. I’m interested in seeing how Leo can handle these records, and especially some of those with more difficult layouts, or of poorer quality. My work, like a lot of historians, is needle-in-a-haystack stuff. But if keyword searchable transcriptions of depositions could be produced quickly and at scale it would be transformative.
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Hi everyone, my name is Anna Harrington. I’m now coming towards the end of the third year of my history PhD at the University of Birmingham, having recently returned from a year of maternity leave. I worked as a solicitor prior to commencing my doctoral studies, and returned to academia in 2021.
In the broadest terms, my thesis is essentially a long exploration of the liminal in the imperial experience. More specifically, I am looking at the experiences of British imperial families who travelled between Britain and the Indian subcontinent in the employ of the East India Company in the Georgian era. I have chapters which variously explore their time on board ship, at “stop off” points encountered en route, and whilst in India.
Most of my source materials are familiar letters and other ego documents (diaries, journals etc.). The handwriting doesn’t tend to be too difficult to read as it’s all in Italic Hand or English Round Hand. But there is often a lot of crosshatching, with poor quality paper and lots of ink blotches etc.
I will be using Leo to transcribe tranches of letters and will likely also use it as a document management system so that I can sift through to find specific correspondents more easily.
I’m looking forward to engaging in this test programme alongside you all.
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