Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation
A Research Division of Carnegie Mellon University

Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

Search a large and growing portion of our online collections, including handwritten documents.
PROTOTYPE

This prototype uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, including a vision-language model (VLM) capable of reading handwritten documents as well as typed and printed text, to create searchable transcriptions of digitized materials in the Hunt Institute Archives. This makes it possible to search the textual contents of individual pages, including material that may not be described in the archival catalog.

Use Keyword search for specific words, names, dates, scientific names, or phrases. Try Semantic search (experimental) to describe a topic, question, or kind of material when you do not know the exact wording used in the documents.

About the AI-generated transcriptions

The transcriptions are generated automatically from page images and may contain errors, especially with difficult handwriting, unusual names, multiple languages, image-quality problems, or complex layouts. They are intended primarily as a discovery aid rather than authoritative transcriptions.

Each result provides the generated transcription and links to the original digitized material and associated archival description so that readings can be checked against the source. The transcription workflow uses AI models run locally by the Hunt Institute.

About Keyword and Semantic search

Keyword search is the default and matches the wording in the transcriptions. Results contain all your terms. Use quotes for an exact phrase. Substring matching is supported, so aceae can find plant-family names ending in -aceae.

Semantic search (experimental) is useful when you know what kind of material you are looking for but do not know the words used in the documents. It ranks transcribed passages by similarity of meaning, so relevant results may not contain the exact words in your query.

Semantic queries can be broad research topics, descriptions of activities or relationships, or natural-language questions. For example:

plant collecting and fieldwork in South America medicinal, culinary, or other traditional uses of plants chromosomes and plant classification early herbals and botanical illustrations botanical institutions exchanging plants, seeds, and specimens microscopy and photomicrography in botanical research How did botanists and gardeners introduce plants from one region to another? grafting, budding, and propagation of tropical fruit crops

Semantic search is not a chatbot: a question is used as a search query, and the system returns archival passages that appear conceptually related to it rather than generating an answer or summary. Short descriptions and ordinary research questions generally work better than lists of disconnected keywords. Quotation marks have no special meaning in Semantic mode. Cross-language matching may work in some cases, but it should not be treated as translation.

Keyword and Semantic search are complementary. Keyword search lets you require particular wording; Semantic search can surface differently worded passages about the same subject. Depending on the research question, trying both can reveal different useful material.

Open a result: use the prominent page-and-transcription link to see the metadata, PDF, and full transcription. Keyword-search terms are highlighted in the transcription.

Archives Collections Database (ArchivesSpace): the Collection, Item/Folder, and Digital Object links open the corresponding archival records. Collection-level dates describe the collection as a whole, not necessarily the specific item or page.

If a PDF does not load: on the detail page, use the Digital Object link, click “Go to file” in ArchivesSpace, and navigate to the page number shown here.

Current limitations
  • Automated transcriptions can contain missing or incorrect text or unintended repetition. Difficult handwriting, image quality, unusual layouts, and multiple languages can reduce accuracy. Always consult the original page image when an exact reading matters.
  • Semantic search remains experimental. Its rankings are an additional discovery aid, not a complete or definitive set of relevant results, and highly ranked pages can sometimes be only broadly related.
  • This is an active prototype. Search coverage, transcriptions, functionality, and the interface may continue to change as additional archival material is processed and the system is improved.

← Back to results

Page 14 · DO #976 · 319_Love_Bx1FF21r

Collection
Áskell Löve (1916–1994) papers
Item/Folder
"Wheatgrasses" (3 of 3)
Digital Object
DO #976, page 14
Collection-level dates
1950–1987
Open PDF at page 14 ↗

Page transcription

VII.

2) Another variant of the morphological approach uses cytogenetic techniques for so-called character analysis. Since the cytogeneticist does not think, he must be faced with the available data and then programmed to analyze them in books and clusters (plants) and analyze them to evaluate them in various ways. Although this technique has been tried for plants of the Triticeae by some scientists, it has seen most of the taxon only by David B. O. who advocated on basis of a detailed cluster analysis of 28 genera that form at least four distinct groups. The problem most remarkable results of this analysis is that the cultivated Triticum is widely distant from the species of the subgenus Hordeastrum, and that the supposedly initial genus Hordeum may be closely related to Tritium and Elymus. It ought to be pointed out that no agronomical or cytological observations were used in this analysis, and that whereas most of the genera were narrowly defined, some others were very collective, but it is nevertheless remarkable that the results seem to support a wide splitting rather than extensive lumping of these genera.

3) The cytological approach is based on studying the number of the chromosomes of the so-called karyotype or idiogram. The number itself, which has been determined for 70% of the taxa, is of interest as a distinction between diploid taxa and their auto- and allopolyploid derivatives, whereas the karyotype or idiogram is important for the identification of so-called haploids and their variants and for the recognition of auto- and allopolyploidy based on these haploids. This method was first used on a large scale on the genus Aegilops (Triticeae) by Semyonov-Mokhovskaya in 1926 (while she was a student of genetics in Leningrad), and we and our students in Winnipeg and Munich made great efforts to carry on the analysis as many species as possible, especially the diploids. We succeeded in analyzing the karyotype of 45% of the wheat genomes, i.e., in 226 taxa, but so far only the results of studies on the wheats of Aegilops and a few other genera have been published by Sarker and by Chumakov.