Hi everyone, I’m Julia Donaldson and I’m the Archivist at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. I look after our collections of historic manuscripts.
These collections include institutional material dating back to our founding in 1786 as Manchester Academy, one of the final dissenting academies to be established in England. Manchester Academy provided higher education to Nonconformists who were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge due to religious tests. The institution changed its name and relocated a few times, before becoming a full member of the University of Oxford in 1996. The archive materials created in the course of its history are pretty diverse, ranging from official minutes and cash books to letters between officials to records of students’ clubs.
Our collections also include personal papers of Protestant nonconformists and social reformers, dating from the seventeenth century onwards. For example, we have some diaries of a female Puritan, some lectures by a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and some letters written by Harriet Martineau.
My aim is to use Leo to better understand the collections that we have; many of our items have now been digitised but their contents are not fully known to us in the College. I hope that Leo will save me the painstaking work of reading through lengthy, handwritten volumes or large collections of documents. The transcripts that Leo provides will help me to answer enquiries more quickly and also to produce better catalogue entries so that researchers can understand which items are relevant to them. I hope that Leo will really open up our archive to a broader range of researchers.
Hi everyone! I’m Taylor Aucoin, a historian of medieval and early modern Britain at the University of Edinburgh. My current project is on the social and cultural history of football in Britain c. 1400-1800, but other interests include work and labour relations, festivity and Carnival. In general, my research focuses on how people used and valued time. I work with any documents which can shed light on the cultural, social and economic experiences and realities of ordinary folk, especially financial and legal records. I’ve spent quite a lot of time with court depositions (particularly those of English quarter sessions - county-level criminal courts), and church court disciplinary records (particularly sabbath-breaking cases), extracting quantitative data from the rich qualitative information these records hold. While these records are fascinating and illuminating in and of themselves, I’m often on the hunt for something specific, like references to work or play. I’m interested to see how Leo can handle these documents. As you might expect, it’s quite time-consuming (though rewarding) combing through thousands of these sources, and speedy, high fidelity transcriptions could prove a big time saver. Bigger picture, they could also open up these incredibly rich sources to a broader audience of researchers and students.
My name is Richard. I am interested in the history and philosophy of the post-medieval and pre-industrial era and thus work on a variety of (European) MSS from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, with a particular interest in the first half of the seventeenth century in England. Thus the MSS I study tend to be written in Latin or English, in italic or (late) secretary hand, with some humanist minuscule also to be found. I am curious what machine transcription will have to offer in this respect.
My name is Daniel Stolzenberg. I teach early modern European history and history of science at UC Davis. My research is about the history of knowledge in early modern Europe (mostly, the 17th-century). I work with both print and manuscript sources, in Latin and other European languages. I am hoping that Leo can do a better job of reading facsimiles of printed books than standard OCR tools (like Acrobat) and that it can help me to decipher manuscripts as well as transcribe them more efficiently.
I am a historian working on various topics in Atlantic world history. I work with eighteenth and nineteenth century manuscripts in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Who are you?
My name is Miguel Novoa. I’m a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Davis, with a research focus on Latin America. My work sits at the intersection of slavery, law, and state formation in 19th-century Peru. I’ve also worked as a teaching consultant and researcher for various academic and policy organizations, including the Center for Educational Effectiveness and the International Food Policy Research Institute.
What is your research about?
My dissertation examines how Peru’s abolition of slavery was reshaped to serve elite interests during the Guano Era (1840s–1860s). I trace how gradual emancipation laws, like the 1821 “freedom of wombs” decree, were implemented in ways that extended servitude rather than ending it. More broadly, my research explores how liberal legal reforms were manipulated to preserve racial and economic hierarchies. I engage with debates around abolition, labor coercion, and republicanism in postcolonial Latin America.
What kinds of manuscripts do you work with?
I work primarily with 19th-century handwritten documents from Peruvian national archives, including government decrees, congressional records, petitions, notarial contracts, and correspondence. These sources are often fragile, inconsistently digitized, and written in difficult-to-read cursive with variable spelling and legal jargon. Transcription is a key bottleneck in my research process.
How are you using Leo?
I will use Leo to help me transcribe and structure large volumes of archival material. I hope it will prove invaluable in deciphering handwritten Spanish-language documents, especially those with elaborate bureaucratic language.
I’m Pete Evans, Manager of Sheffield City Council’s Archives service in the UK.
As a local government archive, we hold a diverse range of materials—local government, courts, coroners, businesses, religious organisations, third sector organizations, schools, large family estates, and personal collections—covering a period from around 1150 right up to the present day.
One of my main interests is improving access to these materials by enriching our online catalogue with as much data as possible. I’m especially keen to explore whether Leo can help us add digitized handwritten text directly into our catalogues, avoiding the need for manual rekeying. This could be a real game-changer in making our collections more accessible to everyone.
My name is Jason Glenn, I’m a historian of science and medicine and an associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I’m working on a project on the early history of policing in the U.S., and how that early history established policing as a structural determinant of health in communities that are over policed and hyper-policed. A large part of that origin story comes out of New Orleans, and those records are in French. This tool will greatly help me digitize those records, translate them more quickly, and put them in a searchable database (Dedoose) for easier analysis. I’m happy to be part of this testing community with you all.
Hi everyone! I’m a former medieval manuscript scholar (my doctoral work was on the manuscripts of a Latin commentary on Ovid), but today I look after all the digital collections and infrastructure at Trinity College Library in Cambridge (UK). Holding collections ranging from cuneiform tablets to modern scientific papers, we’re hoping to use Leo to work across a range of material, drawn primarily from our archival and special collections to see if we can improve our metadata and provide a richer search and discovery environment for users of our digital collections.
As such, I’ll be experimenting with everything from medieval manuscripts and early modern scientific correspondence, to literary autographs and a heavily annotated printed works to see where we may be able to deploy Leo effectively within our collections, and how we might take advantage of it’s capabilities.
Hi, I am Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton, focusing mostly on Caribbean and Latin American History. I am returning to the topic of José Antonio Aponte, the antislavery conspiracy he led, and the book of paintings he made. I’m hoping to use Leo to go through notarial records for the biographical portion of the project and through judicial testimony for the parts on the rebellion and the book.
That’s fascinating, Jon! I recently spent some time in the British Library, and Sloane Mss 2902 has some late seventeenth-century discussions on currency that you might find interesting. I took some pictures and would be happy to share.
Hi, my name is Thiago and I am an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Wayne State University.
I’m working on a global history of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’s first capital, covering roughly 1580 to 1763, coauthored with Chris Ebert (Brooklyn College/CUNY). The main topics of the project are the circulation of sugar and tobacco in Europe, the trade in enslaved Africans (particularly in the Bight of Benin), and smuggling (both on the ground and diplomatic debates).
I’m working with manuscript sources from over 80 archives in fourteen countries and almost as many languages. These are custom records, administrative letters, probate records, diplomatic correspondence, notarial deeds, criminal and inquisition trials, and everything else I can get my hands on. As you can imagine, I do need quite a lot of transcription help!
I’ve been using Transkribus extensively for the past four years, but it doesn’t work very well for Italian yet, so that’s what I am using Leo for right now: some records of the Genoese tobacco monopoly and some merchant correspondence.
Great to see you here Thiago! That would actually be great, if you don’t mind. I’m always on the look out for early-modern money manuscripts to add to the collection
Just share the transcription if you run it through Leo, please! It has some interesting references to Portugal and Spain. I didn’t take pictures of everything, though - there’s more relevant stuff in this volume, if you’re interested in money.
Hi everyone, we are Helen and Salomea archivists at Brasenose College, Oxford. We work with documents dating back to the 12th century, many of which do not have any (or only very brief) catalogue descriptions, so we are keen to use Leo to quickly get information about these documents and therefore improve access to our collections.
Hello. My name is Hannah Robb and I am currently a research associate at Birkbeck, University of London. I work on late medieval and early modern England with a particular interest in the history of credit, money and work. Most recently I have been working on chronicling in the seventeenth century. In my research I have used church court depositions. They are wonderful documents with lots of details of everyday life and in some archives provide a continuum from medieval to early modern. They are however quite messy documents to read. There is an inconsistent use of Latin and plenty of edits and deletions. I am hoping to use Leo to help with the transcription of some of these records to allow key word searches around money and debt to focus my research. I am also eager to see how the technology can cope with records photographed in a series to help piece together large records I have sectioned for photographing.
Hi all! My name is Augusta and I’m a research associate with the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. I’m currently working on a project exploring Ireland & the ‘ends’ of the British empire from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. I’ll be working with an array of British state archives - official records of the Home/Foreign/Colonial/India/Dominions Offices as well as the personal papers of key imperial thinkers. I am looking forward to using Leo to help with deciphering hand-written material and sifting through large quantities of photos of archival papers.
My name is Martina, and I’m currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. In just a few weeks, I’ll be relocating to Paris to begin an associate professorship in early modern Jewish history.
At Penn, one of the projects I’m involved in is a digital humanities initiative focused on the transcription of correspondence from the Sabato Morais Collection. Morais (1823–1897) was an Italian-American rabbi of Portuguese descent, a long-time leader of the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia, a pioneer of Italian Jewish studies in the United States, and a founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which originally trained Orthodox rabbis.
As a native Italian speaker, I’m especially engaged with deciphering and transcribing the many letters written in Italian.
I’m brand new to Leo, and I’m really looking forward to learning more—both about the platform and from this community!
Hello all, my name is Lauren Stokes, and I’m an Associate Professor at Northwestern. My current work is mostly late-20th and even early 21st century–I’m currently working on a book about civil aviation from the passenger perspective–but I come across a lot of one-off handwritten letters from said passengers (lots of complaints!) in national archives. To use those letters effectively, I have to figure out how to read the script in only 2-3 pages, something that is especially difficult when it’s in one of those languages where I only have reading knowledge. I’m curious to see if Leo can do a better job of deciphering those letters than I can.
