Frederick Douglass Travel Diary of Europe and North Africa (1886 - 1887)

This resource provides page-level XML of Frederick Douglass's Travel Diary of Europe and North Africa (1886 - 1887, mss11879 1:1), hereafter DD, alongside a plain .txt version. DD is held as part of the Library of Congress's (LoC) Frederick Douglass Papers (FDPs, 1841 - 1964) (https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/about-this-collection/). The collection images used were digitally captured in-house at the LoC during 2000, alongside the creation of an encoded finding aid by the Manuscript Division. Transcriptions were reached through the training of a bespoke model in Transkribus (Transkribus - Unlocking the past with AI) and marked up with named entities during the manual correction phase. 

DD was chosen for further analysis, alongside Douglass's printed published autobiographies, due to its atypical nature as a longer than normal 19th century travelogue (70 pages, 12,642 words, 1,573 lines). The travelogue also covers a broad geographical range, offering potential to compare Douglass’s portrayal of the countries and individuals he encountered. For the full text recognition and analysis process see Nockels, J., Charlton, A., Nguyen, G., Terras, M. (2025) "God on the stage: A text analysis of Frederick Douglass's religiosity (1845 - 1887)", International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 19(2): 95 - 111. For institutional repository version see: God on the stage: A text analysis of Frederick Douglass’s religiosity (1845 – 1887) - University of Edinburgh Research Explorer