Digital Hugh Blair

January 17, 2023

The Special Collections and University Archives of the James B. Duke Library of Furman University holds a handwritten manuscript copy of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Housed in an archival box alongside Richard Furman’s correspondence and his bifocals, they are unique in being the only academic text traceable to the university’s namesake, Richard Furman.

The digital humanities project began with digital scans and accessibility to the manuscript. Then, students used a combination of human-led and AI-infused (Transkribus) processes to scan the original handwriting and create an easily readable and searchable file (Summer 2025). In Spring of 2025, a capstone class of undergraduate students built a digital home for the project, including teaching units for K-12, audio and video recordings of a lecture to simulate their original scene and sound, a page-by-page flipbook of the manuscript, and a jointly-authored context paper to situate the Furman manuscript.

The project will continue. Two other known manuscripts of student notes are known to exist: University of Edinburgh and Bodleian Library (Oxford). The latter has been scanned (Summer 2026) and will be transcribed in Summer 2027, while the Edinburgh text will be the special focus of a semester program in Edinburgh, Fall 2027.

Eventually we will have a first look at Blair’s changes to the lectures, the market around their dissemination, and their eventual edit into the book form that became the major educational text on rhetoric globally for nearly a century.

Contact Info