The collection
Each is a body of archival material we have transcribed and verified, or are working on with the people who own it. Every reading carries its confidence. Nothing here pretends to be finished when it isn't.
A full 1748 volume: Latin prose and thousands of mathematical expressions, each checked against mathematical truth. The validator flagged Euler's printed π at the 113th digit — de Lagny's 1719 error, reproduced and long unnoticed.
The complete algebra text, 20,431 expressions checked with zero truncation. In the chapter on imaginary quantities the checker flags Euler's own mistake, √(−2)·√(−3) = √6, with no prompting.
The founding text of the calculus of variations. It transcribes cleanly, but its equalities are differential relations, not identities — so the checker reports an honest limit rather than inventing errors. We publish it to show that boundary.
140 documents, 644 pages seized from ships captured at sea. English prize-court appeals and French East India Company papers read reliably; the New Julfa Armenian merchant letters get a name/date index, not a fabricated reading.
389 issues of the second British presidency’s newspaper. The scans have been public for years and the text has not: the OCR was run in Tamil on an English paper, so the text layer holds 57,659 Tamil codepoints and no English word. Re-read with a vision model.
2,334 issues of a colonial commercial sheet. 46.2% of its items are advertisements against the Madras Courier’s 15.9%. 12,291 items use the vocabulary of slavery and 11,200 of those name a person.
How long news actually took to cross the empire, measured from datelines against print dates rather than argued from one quoted example. Paris trails London by ten days into both, because Paris news travelled through London.
The judicial record of the Calcutta Supreme Court, transcribed and reunited as a modern digital edition, alongside a reconstruction of Hicky's Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper printed in the subcontinent.
In collaboration with the historian Andrew Otis
Enciphered diplomatic manuscripts. Accurate capture of the cipher glyphs is the step that unblocks decipherment, and the step ordinary OCR fails. Early, honest, unfinished.
Hundreds of thousands of imaged but un-transcribed pages — the correspondence of Newton, Boyle, Halley and hundreds more. English scientific prose, the founding record of modern science.
Math in manuscript. Reading the hand is the open problem, but the render-and-validate stack transfers unchanged once the LaTeX exists.
An 18th-century apparatus drawing becomes a structured, editable graph of components and connections, not just a caption.
Keep an archive, study one, or want a corpus read? mike@stepsventures.com · How the reading is verified →