Major research project awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

08/06/2019

Our LVTC member Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and colleague David Denison at Manchester have  been awarded a major research grant for a new project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers, by the UK funding body Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, Grant Ref: AH/S007121/1). Nuria and David have built a team of four academics for the new project, the co-conspirators being the literary scholar Sophie Coulombeau and Hannah Barker from History. The three-year grant (1 million GBP, approx. 1,125,000 EUR) also includes three postdoc positions and funding for collaboration with the John Rylands Library (Manchester). 

Nuria and David have been working on the Mary Hamilton Papers for some eight years already, in what can now be called a pilot project Image to Text, drawing on a fantastic archive of late 18C and early 19C letters in the John Rylands. This has involved nearly 200 undergrads and MA students at Manchester, with further contributions from students at Vigo and Uppsala. 403 letters are already available and this summer the correspondence between Mary Hamilton and the Prince of Wales, held in the Royal Archives, will be added to the corpus.

Research in the new project will be based on a complete edition of the Mary Hamilton material in the Rylands and ten other repositories, with full-text search, a personography, a tagged and searchable linguistic corpus, and more. There are research strands in social networks, literature and linguistics. The new project starts later this year!