Elevating research with AM Explorer: Insights from the University of Bristol

In a guest blog, Lewis Goode, a graduate student from the University of Bristol discusses their use of AM's digital archives for research for their masters dissertation. Lewis highlights how the tools available through AM Explorer enable an enhanced research experience. 

AM’s archives were a fantastic resource during my postgraduate studies. When completing my Master's dissertation, I utilised a variety of the databases and collections that AM has to offer. The ability to keyword search and filter out primary source material made my research a lot easier and allowed me to quickly find what I needed. 

I was invited to talk to the AM team about my experiences using their digital archives as part of my research in both my undergraduate and postgraduate historical studies. 

My Master’s dissertation looked at the significance of smell in Nineteenth Century middle-class homes – particularly in the late Nineteenth Century. Sensory history, the study of how our senses affected how we have lived and experienced the world, is a relatively new area of history. This type of history requires historians to look carefully at the words used to describe a sensation—something that makes smell history particularly difficult! 

This is because smell and smells tend to be neglected in written accounts in Western languages. Therefore, when trying to explore smells in texts, historians have to look at a variety of keywords to understand what smells or odours were occurring at that time. Looking ahead to my research, I was worried that I would have to spend ages flipping through books just looking for certain words. 

When looking through some sources beforehand, such as cookbooks, household manuals, and advertisements for cleaning products, on AM Explorer, I was presented with a whole list of material and databases I could access instantly. The databases that were of particular interest to me were the Everyday Life and Women in America, Food and Drink in History, and Gender: Identity and Social Change.

I devised a list of keywords I would look for when searching subsequent primary material. These words included those related to the act of smelling (fragrance, odour/odor, scent), words related to ventilation and the movement of air (musty, stale, fresh), words related to sanitary conditions (dirty, clean, disinfected), words related to emotions attached to smells (comfort, agreeable, disgust), and finally, words about products related to smell (perfume, disinfectant). 

AM’s keyword search was particularly helpful in this instance. By searching the databases for the words I had listed above, I was able to narrow down my searches even further and instantly go to the pages where the words were located, reducing the time I needed to review a single book. 

I could also strategically use keyword searches, such as using an asterisk to encompass multiple words with the same prefix. For example, if I search “smel*”, the search results would also show results for smelling, smelt, smelly, etc. The image below highlights the usefulness of this, especially with the large variation of words I was dealing with. 

As I was also looking at American source material, I could search for American spellings of words. This was particularly useful when searching for odour or “odor” as the Americans would spell it. 

For example, I found a potentially useful household guide called 'Home and Health and Home Economics', publishing in the 1870s. I had searched this document for the word 'fresh,' and the search also included other variations of the word, as well as instances where the word appeared in other forms, such as 'freshness,' as shown in the image below. This was very useful as it allowed me to tackle a multitude of words at once. 

Similarly, after searching for a keyword, the database showed a snapshot of the location of the word in the source. This was particularly useful as I could easily determine the context of the word and whether it fitted my research needs. As I had a focus on the smell of rooms and houses, I could instantly tell if a hit was relevant. For example, from the image below, I can tell that page 19 is the only one relevant to my research; the rest are all about food. 

Overall, AM’s databases enable strategic, easy-to-use, and helpful searches when researching and discovering new sources. Helped by their ability to pinpoint and filter years, words, and types of publication, using it makes for a valuable experience.