The Mary Hamilton Papers online edition is now officially complete! After a major upload of new and revised material on 25 August 2023, and a further revision of text, person references and personography on 21 November 2023, it has 3201 items, half of them transcribed, including all her diaries. As you may recall, our online edition was officially launched on 27 September 2022 (video here), though it had already been building from small beginnings since 2014.
What does ‘complete’ mean here? We think that the edition as it now stands can be regarded as a worthy outcome of our generous AHRC grant. (Other outputs are based on the edition, including wide-ranging research, teaching materials and broadcasts, all still in progress.) The funding ran till November 2022, and our three fantastic post-docs, Tino Oudesluijs, Cassie Ulph and Christine Wallis, can no longer be expected to devote much time to the Hamilton edition, though all three are involved in research and publications that make use of the edition. Another sign of completeness is that Professor Sebastian Hoffmann has delivered the fourth and final version of his index for the CQPweb search engine, covering every one of the transcriptions online and allowing an unusually wide range of search possibilities (see for instance here and here). So in those senses, the edition can be called complete. Currently we're adding some interactive social network diagrams to the website (see here), and a few minor metadata corrections in files will be picked up when Manchester Digital Collections is next refreshed.
But of course, few editors are wholly satisfied. The most recent upload has allowed even more of the 38,000 persons mentioned in the Papers to be linked to a personography entry (see here). After that, we expect to go on in piecemeal fashion, transcribing a further selection of what we have, perhaps adding some new items not previously available, and correcting text and mark-up — all ‘as resources permit’, the main resource in question being the time of Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and myself. Another resource we would really appreciate is suggestions from users of the edition. Please let us know of corrections we should make or gaps you can help us fill, whether in transcription or footnotes, identification of persons, or even the existence of letters we haven't yet gathered. And keep an eye on our publications (here) for the description of the edition, the edited volume we are producing on Hamilton's social networks, and specific work on our research strands.