- Dates
- 1888 – 1910
- Eras
- French eraEarly American eraStrang era
- Concepts
- historiographyanishinaabe-odawaFrench eraEarly American eraStrang era
Summary
The project holds a growing, explicitly partial working corpus from the Wisconsin Historical Collections: volumes XI, XIII, XIV, XVI, XVIII, and XIX. The series supplies edited transcriptions, historical essays, and source notes for Great Lakes, Mackinac, French-regime, fur-trade, and nineteenth-century regional research. It is a discovery and corroboration layer, not a substitute for the manuscript, map, treaty, or community knowledge from which an item was drawn.
Holdings and method
Volumes XI, XIII, and XIV were selected only after Internet Archive item metadata identified their volume numbers; the collection script refuses an item whose metadata label does not match. It retains DjVu text derivatives with per-file provenance rather than duplicate scan PDFs. Volumes XVI, XVIII, and XIX were already held before this pass. The manifest records the three new items and their lexical-screen results.
The corpus has direct research value but uneven evidentiary force. For example, volume XIX contains an edited printing of Puthuff’s 1816 report and is separately described in Wisconsin Historical Collections, volume XIX, 1910. By contrast, the new phrase screens in volumes XI and XIV identify candidate mentions only; they do not establish historical events, occupancy, ancestry, place identity, or production figures. Before a passage changes an entity or event, its scan page and the volume’s source note must be read.
Limits and open questions
- The current six-volume holding is not a complete series; an absence from it is not evidence of absence from the published run or the underlying archives.
- Editorial selections and annotations can be valuable guides while still carrying the editor’s framing. An edited reprint is not automatically the original primary document.
- Which page-directed candidates can be checked against scans and then traced to their named underlying manuscripts or publications?
- Which further volumes have stable, openly downloadable, correctly identified scans suitable for a similarly verified extension?
See also
Sources
- The manifest identifies the exact Internet Archive item, the item metadata volume label, local DjVu text derivative, retrieval provenance, and whitespace-aware discovery counts for each newly collected volume.
- Volume XVI title page checked in the held text; volumes XVIII and XIX are separately held under their own Internet Archive items. The project does not claim a complete run.
Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes
Cite this article
Beaver Island Archive, “Wisconsin Historical Collections source corpus”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/wisconsin-historical-collections-corpus/, accessed [date], citing Project manifest for a metadata-checked Wisconsin Historical Collections text tranche, volumes XI, XIII, and XIV, Internet Archive items retrieved 2026-08-02. (and 1 further source listed on the page).
Last revised 2026-08-02. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.
BibTeX for “Wisconsin Historical Collections source corpus”RIS for “Wisconsin Historical Collections source corpus”