2008–present: transcription contractor as sole trader and as director of Different Hand Ltd. Some clients' identities are confidential but those who can be named include:
The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England (Birkbeck University of London and University College London): transcription and basic XML markup of 2,200 pages of petitions (c. 600,000 words). The petitions that I transcribed for this project have been published at British History Online.
Corpus Synodalium: a database of medieval church statutes compiled by Professor Rowan Dorin at Harvard and Stanford universities. I contributed transcripts of printed Latin texts that were too difficult for OCR (c. 645,000 words).
The Wandering Grocer: the journals of William Whitehead, a grocer from West Hartlepool, who travelled around the world in 1898. I proofread, corrected, and indexed an existing transcript.
Cambridge Population Group:
Life in
the Suburbs. Entered burial registers from St Botolph Aldgate into Access database, checked and corrected work done by others, calendared tax records and indemnity bonds into Excel spreadsheets. The parish register database that I contributed to has been published at SAS-Space, and part has been republished at London Lives.
The
Origins of the Modern Demographic Regime: Infant Mortality by Social
Status in Georgian London. Entered parish registers from St Martin in the Fields into Access database.
Pilot for Mortality
and Epidemiological Change in Manchester, 1750-1850. Entered burial registers from Manchester Cathedral into Access database.
History of Parliament:
1624
Parliament. Transcribed the
diary of Richard Dyott MP after enhancing the page images to compensate for water damage. Transcript was published at British History Online.
House of Lords. Visited The National Archives at Kew to check microfilm of 17th-century probate administrations against Excel spreadsheet.
2016–2017: casual data inputter, Cambridge Population Group. Checked census data against document images and linked records between census datasets.
Volunteering and personal projects
Independent researcher. My own research on the British Civil Wars has made extensive use of manuscript documents at TNA, the British Library and the Bodleian Library, including financial records, wills, letters, and diaries. I have used many digital tools to organize and analyse research material, including Zotero, databases, spreadsheets, OpenRefine, Python scripts, Oxygen XML Editor, Semantic MediaWiki, and QGIS.
Editor at Wikidata. I am curating data about historians whose work is relevant to the British Civil Wars. I imported several hundred new items using OpenRefine and have improved hundreds of existing items. This work is particularly focused on linking Wikidata items to external identifiers and disambiguating authors.
Sandall’s History of 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment: A Digital Edition. I produced this digital edition of an out of copyright regimental history from the First World War. This included checking copyright status, scanning pages, uploading page scans to the Internet Archive, capturing text with OCR software, checking and editing the text, marking up with TEI XML, record linkage, and using XSL to transform to HTML.
Admin at Linking Experiences of World War One. This experimental project was part of Mia Ridge's fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. I took part in consultations about data structures, imported large batches of wiki pages representing military units, helped to design MediaWiki templates and organize categories, and wrote documentation and guides to sources.
Community moderator at Your Archives. Transcribed documents, checked other users' transcripts, wrote guides to sources, categorized pages and organized category hierarchies, patrolled users' edits, designed and documented MediaWiki templates, and engaged in discussions about possible future projects.
Beta tester for From the Page collaborative transcription software, developed by Ben Brumfield. This was one of the first online platforms for crowdsourced manuscript transcription and indexing. I helped to test it using family letters from the First World War.
Beta tester and contributor at Lives of the First World War. I used this platform to share existing research and conduct new research about my family and other staff members of the printing firm that some of them worked for. This involved locating and transcribing soldiers' service records, unit war diaries, census returns, and birth, marriage, and death certificates.
Contributor to GB1900. Transcribed text from early Ordnance Survey maps.
Peer reviewer for The Programming Historian, 1st edition.
Education
PhD in History, Reading University, 2001. Thesis based on detailed research on financial records in TNA, SP 28. Also included a course in 14th- and 15th-century English palaeography in the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.
MA in Military History, Leeds University, 1996.
BA first class honours in History, Reading University, 1995.