Hello Everyone! My name is Andrew and I am a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews in Modern History. My work focuses on the education and upbringing of children within declining political movements during the eighteenth century. My dissertation focuses on how parents within the Jacobite political movement sought to inculcate values to the next generation, which sustained the movement for close to a century. Right now, I work quite a bit with school records and burgh records that have not been transcribed (or were done poorly). My hope is that Leo can help create something more searchable in order to extract demographic data for the final dissertation.
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Hello everyone. Iām Steven Lubar, recently retired history professor at Brown University. Most of my work has been on the history of museums and the history of technology, but Iām starting a new local history project about the small town of Little Compton, RI. Iām curious to see what possibilities open up if I have easy access to the town records back to the 17th century. Can I tell new stories? Can I look across time more easily, rather than focusing on one era? Might transcriptions allow a broader public access to these documents? Iāll start with town council records, and then perhaps move on to probate inventories and land records. Still trying to figure out the best way to organize these documents.
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Thanks to Jon and Jack for creating this amazing tool. Itās nice to see so many Northwestern people on here too. Iām Scott Sowerby, and Iām an associate professor in the Department of History at Northwestern. Iām working on a book on religious toleration in early modern Europe. Lately, Iāve been broadening out from my home field of early modern Britain to look at the histories of a number of other European countries in the sixteeenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Like a lot of people on here, Iām planning to use this tool to transcribe documents (mainly correspondence) in languages I donāt know (or donāt know very well). Up to this point, Iāve been hiring research assistants to help with these languages, but itās just too expensive to get translations done of more than 10 or 15 pages at a time. I hope to use this resource, along with the translation website DeepL, to make rough translations of hundreds of manuscript pages, so that I can then zero in on the sections of most interest, at which point Iāll hire someone to check the transcription and translation for me.
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Hi all! My name is Odile Panetta; I am a historian of early modern Europe, currently based at the University of Oxford and at Aarhus University in Denmark.
My research largely focusses on Protestant political thought between the sixteenth and early seventeenth century: my doctorate explored the contributions brought by Italian Protestant exiles to the mid-sixteenth-century Swiss debate over the legitimacy of punishing heretics, while my current interest lies in 1) treatments of punishment and discipline in early modern Reformed thought, and 2) the teaching of political theology in Reformed universities and academies.
I largely work with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century printed and manuscript material (treatises, correspondence, Biblical commentaries, pamphlets etc.). I am hoping Leo will help me transcribe some of this material so as to make it searchable.
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Hi! My name is Jobie, Iām a history PhD student at Duke. Iām a licensed preservation architect that specializes in slave houses. I have a non-profit called [Saving Slave Houses] (https://www.savingslavehouses.org). I am back in school to do a dissertation about a 19th-century Virginia plantation I have been doing research on for over 10 years. For my doctoral work I am looking at birth records of enslaved women in America to understand how enslavers documented, and the booking keeping of, slave breeding. I am primarily working with the family papers of one enslaving family from Virginia because their records are incredibly complete, detailed, and have not been studied before. The family papers Iām working with had their own type of shorthand. Iām using Leo to help me with some of the more difficult handwriting and also to get through the extensive collection.
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Hi everybody! My name is Olivier Feis and Iām a PhD candidate at the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History at the University of St Andrews. My research focuses on Scandinavian-German scientific exchanges in the field of eugenics, roughly between 1905 and 1940. More specifically, my thesis investigates the role that such exchanges played in shaping domestic eugenic discourses and policies in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. I am therefore particularly interested in Scandinavian-German cooperation in the field.
I primarily work with personal and institution-level correspondences between individual eugenicists, though I also draw significantly on journal articles and monographs that my āusual suspectsā published during the period.
I use Leo to transcribe and catalogue the substantial personal correspondences (mostly handwritten letters) between Scandinavian and German eugenicists that I have acquired from various archives in Norway, Sweden and Germany, in order to ultimately facilitate the translation process.
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Hi, my name is Ailsa and I am a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. My research concerns food and dining culture in eighteenth-century Britain. I look specifically at the growing, importing, preparing and eating of āluxuryā foods and how these foods influenced and impacted the lives of the labouring and middling classes.
I use a wide variety of sources in my research including diaries and letters, material culture, satirical imagery and fine art. Iām using Leo to help manage a mountain of manuscript recipes. These recipe collections contain valuable insights into everyday lives, changing techniques, foreign influences and evolving palates across the century.
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Hi all, Iām Tim Kircher, and I teach history at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. My current research is on the Neolatin personal letters of Renaissance humanists. A number of these letters are still in manuscript and Iām eager to see how Leo will transcribe them. Iām just getting started and will let you know how it goes. Thank you for this opportunity.
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Hi all. Iām a professor emeritus of economic history. Iāve been working for years on the interactions between paper money, public finance and power (both political and economic) in eighteenth-century England and France. I have spent a lot of time with the minutes and papers of treasuries and banks. But the sources Iāve found most useful are bank ledgers, since they give invaluable insights into how paper monies actually functioned (or didnāt). Iām hoping to use Leo to automate the work of digitizing the general ledgers of the Bank of England and Baring during the Restriction years (the first long-term experiment in a non-convertible paper money).
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Hi everyone!
Iām Danielle, a PhD candidate in Modern European History at Florida State University. My research focuses on women agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War, exploring how gender shaped their recruitment, training, and treatment in the field.
I work primarily with handwritten wartime documentsāletters, personnel files, military reports, and testimoniesāfrom archives including the Imperial War Museum and Yad Vashem. Many of these are in English, French, and German and can be quite difficult to read due to fading ink, inconsistent handwriting, and paper quality.
Iām excited to use Leo to help transcribe and organize these multilingual materials, make them searchable, and streamline my workflow for both dissertation research and future public-history projects.
Looking forward to learning from everyone here and seeing how youāre using Leo in your own work!
āDanielle
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Hi there, Iām Alex, an historian of modern European ideas at CUNY in New York City. Iām currently working on a project related to French imperial expansion in the 1880s. This has involved a lot of letters, memorandums, clippings, minutes and other handwritten material from the French ministry of foreign affairs, among ambassadors posted abroad, and between French functionaries and politicians and those of other statesā diplomats and so forth. My hope is that Leo can help me to transcribe ā and better understand ā some of the more difficult-to-parse late nineteenth century handwriting I am coming across in the archives.
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