Unlocking the Mary Hamilton papers

Overview of 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). Its home page is here.

  • For a brief guide to using the edition, click here.
  • For a formal description of the edition as part of its DOI, click 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 about 2,600 authors, recipients and identified persons mentioned in the transcribed portion of the edition, see selected fields from our personography here.
  • For a shorter list confined to 257 writers and recipients of correspondence, 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 the last major upload was added on 25 August 2023, revised 21 November 2023 and 29 July 2024. There are now 1598 transcribed and 1603 untranscribed items available. Checking of transcriptions and mark-up continues, and more transcriptions may be added if and when resources permit.

  • For technical reasons, the untranscribed manuscript volumes HAM/3/1 and HAM/3/2 are marked in MDC as ‘transcribed’, in order to display detailed inventories of their contents.
  • Plain text transcriptions of the corpus released to date, with diplomatic and normalised TXT files in separate zip files, are freely available for non-profit use to anyone who registers. Just fill in our simple online form here.

Mouseover examples

Mouseover tooltips: 'Rhea', 'our friend'

Associated databases

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 listing of fields for name, dates, authority files/biography and ID is available here.

An external database system called HEURIST has been used by research teams in the project to gather and index tagged data from the files, in order to reveal and display connections.

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. An exciting beta feature on the site has a network map based on the correspondence and useful geographical maps and bar charts, here.