The Cullen Project Explorer

What this is

The Cullen Project Explorer is an analytical companion to the Cullen Project, a collaboration between the Medical Humanities Research Centre, School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE), funded by a major AHRC research grant award (2012–15). The Cullen Project presents a publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical consultation letters.

The Explorer is a separate research tool that adds corpus-linguistic and quantitative analysis capabilities on top of the Glasgow edition's data. It hosts no letter images and displays no full transcriptions — every "read this letter" action links to the Glasgow website. The Explorer provides: subcorpus construction, concordance (KWIC), comparative keyness with register profiles, distribution views, and a showcase of curated analyses.

For important background about the archive and the creation of these letters, see the Cullen Project's archive page. For a short overview of Cullen and the place of these consultation letters in his work, see their introduction to William Cullen. For more information about the original project and team, see the project team page.

Dr David Shuttleton, the PI of the original Cullen Project, has published extensively on the context behind Cullen's consultation letters, including:

• Shuttleton, D. E., '…to whom it will be extremly Usefull.' Dr William Cullen's adoption of James Watt's copying machine', Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 46(2), (2016), pp. 127–133. doi:10.4997/JRCPE.2016.213
• Shuttleton, D. E., '"Please put a date to your letters…": Dr William Cullen's conduct of his epistolary practice', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39(1), (2016), pp. 59–77.
• Shuttleton, D. E., 'The medical consultation letters of Dr William Cullen: The launch of a digital edition', Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 45(3), (2015), pp. 188–189.
• Shuttleton, D. E., 'John Thomson's "Account…of Dr William Cullen": the making of a medical biography', in Shuttleton, D. E. and Coyer, M. (eds.), Scottish Medical Culture and Literature 1726–1832 (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2014).

The creator

The Cullen Project Explorer was created by Dr Jeffrey C. Wolf in 2026. Dr Wolf's doctoral dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 2015) examined William Cullen's medical theory, and he continues to research and publish on Cullen and eighteenth-century Scottish medicine.

For queries about the Explorer, please contact him here.

Data provenance

The source data was downloaded from the University of Glasgow's research data repository: researchdata.gla.ac.uk/1225. Permission to redistribute derived data has been secured from Glasgow. The derived analytical dataset (the SQLite database powering this site) is produced by an ETL pipeline that reads the raw data, parses TEI XML, computes linguistic features, and outputs a compact read-only database. The ETL source code is published alongside this tool.

How to cite

If you use the Cullen Project Explorer in your research, please cite both the software and the dataset:

The tool:

Wolf, Jeffrey C. (2026). Cullen Project Explorer (v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19728605

The derived dataset:

Wolf, Jeffrey C. (2026). Cullen Project Explorer: derived analytical dataset (v1.0.0) [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19729125

The underlying source data:

Guariento, L., Shuttleton, D., Herraghty, M., Bann, J., Butler, J., DeWald, R., Gilchrist, M., Green, J., Hall, S., Kane, E., Maxwell, F., McClelland, L., Rambaran-Olm, M., Weir, G. and Williams, V. (2021). The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. University of Glasgow. DOI: 10.5525/gla.researchdata.1225

The scholarly edition:

The Cullen Project. University of Glasgow / Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. cullenproject.ac.uk. For editorial methodology, see their methodology page.

License and rights

The source data is published by the University of Glasgow in their research data repository (DOI: 10.5525/gla.researchdata.1225) and is freely available for download. The Explorer presents derived analytical outputs — aggregated statistics, concordance extracts, and computed features — rather than reproducing the source transcriptions, which remain on the Glasgow edition website.

Acknowledgments