Washington University Libraries received one of the largest grants in the institution’s history, a $376,426 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The money will fund the St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project, which aims to digitize pre-Civil War lawsuits that slaves brought against slaveholders in the St. Louis Circuit Court.
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The newly funded Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project takes the digitalization process a step further. In addition to finishing the scanning of more than 20,000 pages of city directories and court records, the project also seeks to transcribe the documents to enable full-text searches.
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The primary novel aspect of this project is to “develop extensions to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for encoding legal documents to reflect legal function, genres and roles, and employ these extensions in this collection,” according to a grant announcement.
In other words, this project seeks to develop a computer language for annotating the legal functions of documents. This language would be comparable to HTML, which is used to denote structural semantics for Web pages. Ultimately, this innovation will be integrated into TEI, the existing language, to provide a model for similar archives.
Source: Student Library (Washington University, St. Louis, MO)
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