Diary, letters and poems of Marjory Fleming

This dataset comprises text and images of the diary, letters and poems of Marjory Fleming.

Majory Fleming (1803-1811) was a Scottish child author, born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, who became posthumously famous for her free-thinking and precocious diaries. Written mainly in Edinburgh and the holiday retreats of Ravelston and Braehead, they provide an authoritative record of Marjory’s life, schoolwork, and passing. The attention given to these diaries in the later Victorian period saw her fêted by men of letters, and embedded in the public consciousness. The pages transcribed here form a portfolio of three volumes of Marjory’s diary (1810-1811), which were deposited in the National Library of Scotland in 1930, and are a key source for those seeking a situational history of early 19th century Scotland.

This collection is the first Library dataset created using HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) software, which is a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This involved hand-transcribing approximately 50 pages of Fleming’s diary in the Transkribus platform to build a model of her handwriting, which could be applied to the whole collection. For further information see the readme and METS files in this dataset.