Principal Investigator: American Culture Studies
The St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records was a long-running project with collaborators from a wide range of organizations, including the St. Louis Circuit Court Clerk, the Missouri State Archives, The University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis University, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, Central Missouri State University and Washington University in St. Louis. The HDW built the current website, and supported it until it was turned over to the university's Digital Library Services.
In late 2009, Washington University in St. Louis was awarded a grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to further digitize the freedom suits contained in the archive. Records from the suits were transcribed, marked up in TEI, and supplemented with additional tags identifying places and names. The HDW provided support to the project in the form of TEI expertise, especially in connection with the project's goal of developing a TEI schema for encoding legal documents, and in the form of processing pipelines for performing automated named entity recognition.
