Unlocking the Mary Hamilton papers

Edition: The Mary Hamilton Papers

Some salutations addressed to Mary Hamilton

Salutations

The edition of The Mary Hamilton Papers is a collection on open access in Manchester Digital Collections (MDC). Go to it here.

  • For a brief introduction to using the edition, see here.
  • Navigating to a particular item is most conveniently done from the home page of the collection in MDC. We also provide a list as an Excel spreadsheet, with a link to each currently available item in MDC.
  • For a list of over 2500 authors, recipients and identified persons mentioned in the transcribed portion of the edition, see an extract from our personography here. For a much shorter list confined to 118 known writers and recipients of correspondence [soon to be 201 correspondents], see here.
  • See an overview of our editorial policies here.
  • (for TEI nerds only!)  See the full TEI schema here, with detailed guidelines for coders.

The edition was launched formally on 27 September 2022 and is in progress, with an expected completion date of mid-2023. Checking of transcriptions and mark-up continues. At launch there were 1509 transcribed items available, plus 154 untranscribed items. More of each will be added in batches over the coming months, to a total of over 3000 items.

Associated databases

Correspondence network

Correspondence network

 

An external search program called CQPweb is available to users as well as the project team for text searches in The Mary Hamilton Papers. All of the text apart from annotations and footnotes, and most of the mark-up, has been indexed in CQPweb, on which see here.

All authors and other correspondents in the edition, plus (in principle) all persons mentioned in the transcribed texts, have been entered in a 'personography' created by the project team. This supplies the brief tooltips that appear over mentions of persons, and it is planned to offer a click-through to fuller biographical information on those persons who have been identified. Meanwhile a preliminary listing of fields for name, dates, authority files/biography and ID is available here.

An external database system called HEURIST is being used by research teams in the project to gather and index tagged data from the files, in order to reveal and display connections. In future there will be access via the project website to network information on the archive derived via HEURIST.

Metadata from the correspondence element of the edition has been encoded in 'Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format' (CMIF) and added to a searchable international index of letters, correspSearch, with persons and places linked to authority files.