Eight years of expert cataloging, tens of thousands of documents, and the arithmetic that forced a new method — the project's statement essay, told through one 1803 Dundee lawsuit.
In 1803 the bakers of Dundee sued their own town council over a mill monopoly. For two centuries their Information — twenty pages of dense letterpress, argued by George Joseph Bell — sat in a bound volume, findable only by someone who already knew to look for it. It is findable now: by the bakers' name, by the law of thirlage, by the mills of Dundee on a map, by every person and place its pages mention. This essay is about why that took new methods — and why we believe those methods matter beyond this archive.
Open-weight models, human judgment, and provenance at every step: how the archive's computational work is held to an archival standard.
