Law in British Periodicals

This organization hosts datasets and tools for the Law in British Periodicals project, a collaborative digital humanities initiative investigating the representation of legal and dramatic sociolects in 18th- and 19th-century British periodical literature.

Datasets

Current holdings include page-level images and OCR transcriptions of British periodical issues from 1770 and 1811, with additional years planned. Each dataset provides:

• Page images rasterized from archival PDFs at 150 DPI
• OCR transcriptions in Markdown format
• Provenance metadata linking each page image to its source file, page number, and total page count

Team

This project is a collaboration across Boston University, SMU, and Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.

Methods

OCR pipelines are implemented using uv-scripts/ocr and run via Hugging Face Jobs. All datasets are private due to contractual restrictions.