The ARTFL Project

John Carter Brown Library - Haiti Collection

"The John Carter Brown Library holds one of the world's great collections relating to Haiti. Our rare books, maps and newspapers tell the story of the founding of the French colony of Saint Domingue (once the most lucrative colony in the Americas), its demise through the Haitian Revolution (the world's only successful slave revolution) and the founding of Haiti in its place. By providing access to this collection, the JCB hopes to stimulate interest in Haiti's remarkable history." The collection is made available through the Internet Archive and is featured in the “Remember Haiti” exposition.

As part of preliminary work on the development of a larger collection of French and English documents related to slavery in the 18th and early 19th century, we are developing automatic processes to run new OCR applications on existing pages images found in collections on various platforms. For this experiment, we developed an automated script which downloaded the existing page images and metadata from the Internet Archive, used the Kraken OCR system, and loaded the results in the latest version of PhiloLogic (4.7). This database should be considered to be a form of standoff index which provides facilities to link back to the Internet Archive site to browse page images. Preliminary estimates suggest that the OCR text is significantly better than what is currently available on the IA, providing better search and retrieval capabilities as well as improved legibility for readers. There are, of course, still many errors and the user is advised to always use the page images as the definitive source for citation and other scholarly uses.

Search the JCB Haiti Collection using PhiloLogic4.7
Search Topics and Analyze Vocabulary using TopoLogic