Your library provides perpetual access to millions of primary sources from AM, from government documents and colonial records to oral histories, surveys, music and film. Explore the ways scholars have used digitised primary sources in their research and the tools available from AM to support you with your research, from Handwritten Text Recognition to cross-federated search.
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Professor Atwater’s important field of interest, as he describes it, is that of "trying to clarify earthquake and tsunami potential in the north-east Caribbean". Working with colleagues from Canada, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and the United States, he has been focusing on assessing the possible tsunami threat to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands from the Puerto Rico Trench, looking to use the history of the region as a natural warning system for coastal hazards.
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This collection covers the history of the various territories under British colonial governance from 1624 to 1870. It includes administrative documentation, trade and shipping records, minutes of council meetings, as well as details of plantation life, colonial settlement, imperial rivalries across the region, and the growing concern of absentee landlords.
Arthur Munby completed 64 volumes of diaries over a period of 40 years; the Munby Collection also contains his notebooks, letters, photographs, and drawings, as well as the diaries of Munby’s wife, Hannah Cullwick. To research this volume of material, McTavish started with the document metadata, which included a document description that was usually taken from Munby’s own index to the diary. Because Harriet Langdon – a woman whose nose and lips had been damaged by lupus vulgaris, for whom Munby developed an obsession – was central to McTavish’s dissertation, she initially prioritised volumes that mentioned Langdon’s name in the description field of the metadata.
However, if Munby had omitted Langdon in his index, she might not always appear in the metadata. “So that’s when I started using the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool, to search for the keywords within diaries”. The keywords McTavish started her search with included “Harriet”, “Langdon”, “Harriet Langdon”, “noseless”, “disgust” and “dirt”. Using these as her primary keywords, she soon started to notice patterns that pointed her towards the right passages, even when Harriet’s name did not appear in the metadata. Using HTR, she also discovered another woman with visible disabilities in the diaries not referenced so far by any other Munby scholar. McTavish was therefore able to expand the scope of Munby scholarship by surfacing a forgotten figure – all made possible by HTR.
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Explore the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations.
In many cases, finding notes in playbooks from only actors was a laborious and time-consuming task which involved requesting and viewing each playbook individually – page by page. In some instances, this would involve requesting and physically reviewing 50 to 75 playbooks a day.
"It’s an incredibly useful database, easy to understand and navigate, that allows the Folger Shakespeare Library to share important documents while preserving them safely. I could not have done my research nearly so extensively without it and I know from experience in paper archives that it allowed for far greater speed and efficacy than would have been otherwise possible", Arlynda said.
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Rare and unique prompt books from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. The prompt books tell the stories of key performances as they were put on in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and further afield, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
Through machine learning and neural networks, Handwritten Text Recognition makes it possible to search keywords across handwritten manuscript material. Within the AM Quartex platform, you can also download uncorrected transcripts in .txt format.
Through AM Search, all the AM primary source content that your institution has access to can be viewed and searched in a single interface. To assess relevance, the algorithm analyses word hits in the document and its associated metadata to weigh the relevance of each primary source. You can also see the number of document hits in each database in a filter list to the left of your search results, which can help identify the most relevant collections to your research topic.