The following documents can be downloaded for use by volunteers to the project, scholars, and the community. These documents are all released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
"Transcription Instructions:" This .pdf file gives detailed information on how to transcribe the ledger through the "Smithsonian's Transcription Center".
"Comparative Reports:" This spreadsheet gives comprehensive lists of all customers, objects, and categories as they appear in the four existing data sets.
"Category List:" This list was used to standardize the designation of categories and subcategories for common objects in the database.
"Ramsay Class Final Data Set:" This is the original data set which was compiled by undergraduate and graduate students as part of a 2013 seminar at UW Madison with Dr. Ann Smart Martin. This data set reflects an assortment of purchases selected because they were highly detailed or were considered important or unusual.
"Sample Data Set:" This 10% sample was created by entering all sales of every tenth customer in the ledger.
"Women's Data Set:" This is a data set of all women customers. The women were identified based on names and designated marital status, like Miss or Mrs.
"Race Data Set:" This is a data set African American customers. The initial search criteria was for customers who were either identified as property or negroes, or identified with only one name. A thorough search of the ledger produced only 5 customers grouped together on page 233.
As an open source digital and public humanities project, we are open to community involvement from individuals, classes, or museums and collections. Please contact Morgan Lemmer-Webber (mlemmer@wisc.edu) or Ann Smart-Martin (asmartin@wisc.edu) if you are interested in contributing to the Ramsay project. Possible ways to contribute include:
- Transcription and data entry.
- Research for object entries and customer profiles
- Incorporating objects from your collections into the website
- Data visualization
- Web design and development