I was looking for a quick and easy way of collating a corpus of documents from the amazing American Presidency Project, and I ended up developing my own browser add-on…

What it does

Once you perform a search (whether simple or advanced) on the website, the extension adds a frame above the list of search results giving you the option to extract and download an archive of all the documents listed on the page.

Choose the default TXT format or XML (useful for some concordance software) and click ‘Extract & Download’. A few seconds later, a zip folder named ‘Archive.zip’ lands in your downloads folder: unzip it to access the documents.

Repeat the process for each subsequent page of results.

Here’s a little demo video:

Download and install

Firefox (recommended)

Chrome / Edge

  • Download the zip package;
  • Unzip the archive;
  • Open the extension manager (chrome://extensions or edge://extensions);
  • Enable “Developer mode”;
  • Click “Load unpacked” and load the unzipped folder.