Materials

Source

Mary Hamilton Papers (1743–1826). GB 133 HAM. Collection available at The John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 3EH, England, tel.: +44 (0)161 275 3764, fax: +44 (0)161 834 5574.

ELGAR Catalogue: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/manchesteruniversity/data/gb133-ham

See the Table of Letters on our website for details.

Transliterations

From 2013/14 to 2017/18, one component of the final-year undergraduate course – and since 2015/16, also MA – unit ‘Modern English Language (1500–present)’ required students to transliterate two letters each from the Hamilton collection and to write a linguistic commentary on them. They were asked to reproduce the spelling and punctuation exactly, and to mark up their transliterations according to a subset of the copious TEI and XML guidelines (TEI P5). The initial output produced by the students was revised by a research assistant, who also produced the XML files, and by the coordinators of the project, David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza.

The transliterations are presented on-screen on our project website in a form that allows easy comparison with the corresponding digitised image. The links open a new tab with transliteration in diplomatic text, normalised text, metadata and image. (Image requires PDF to be displayed in the browser.) The full XML text and TEI header may be more suitable for further research, or an original-spelling or normalised plain-text version. The TXT archives of the ‘Image-to-Text’ project are freely available for non-profit use.

In summer 2016, with the encouragement of the John Rylands Library, we started the expansion of the project with the aim of producing a complete online edition of the Mary Hamilton Papers. In November 2016 we were awarded a seedcorn grant by the John Rylands Research Institute, allowing us to add to the corpus and greatly improve the annotation and mark-up of existing files. This has led us to the new project ‘Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers’, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council from December 2019 to December 2022.