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Letter Cultures – Briefkulturen – Brevkulturer. NorKorr presents the America Letters in Berlin

Prospects of Research

On June 16th and 17th, the international closing conference of the large-scale project “The German Letter in the 18th Century” invited researchers and cultural heritage specialists to discuss the current state of research and explore the perspectives and trajectories of contemporary research on “letter culture” from the 17th through the 19th century. The scope was multidisciplinary, though the majority of contributions had a cultural history angle.

The tightly packed event featured 14 talks, with a refreshing majority of the presenters being women. The format was hybrid—some talks were given online, and it was possible to follow the entire conference from the (home) office. Hybrid events are never easy, and I wonder if we have yet to find the best way to engage both virtual and on-site participants in a discussion.

What did the presenters talk about? Correspondences of High Nobility. It may be that I am somewhat biased, but I did not expect that examining the letter writing of Dukes, Duchesses, Kings, Queens, Emperors, and Empresses would still receive so much attention. Interestingly, the correspondences in question were exclusively those of women and their family networks. Other presentations examined the scholarly correspondence of the Early Modern Period.

Feminist Research Design: A Manifesto

In my view, the most impressive and noteworthy talk was given by Frederike Neuber (Berlin) and Selma Jahnke (Vienna). They departed from the printed correspondence edition of Jean Paul. Jean Paul (1763–1835) wrote many letters together with his wife, Karoline Mayer (1777–1860); they would continue each other’s letters and send them to the recipient(s). In the printed edition, however, the editors omitted Karoline’s contributions, stating in footnotes that she “also wrote something,” thereby obfuscating the extent of her writing and the couple’s general practice of collaborating and participating equally in written conversations with friends and family.

Neuber and Jahnke showed how they emphasised this aspect in the new, digital edition of Jean Paul’s work and writings, and how they expanded the monocentric nature of a ‘letters by so-and-so’ edition with a multidimensional approach of participatory letter writing and reading in the social circles of the couple’s peers.

They finished their engaging and refreshing talk with 10 principles for a feminist research design:1

  1. Critical Engagement with Textual Tradition and De-canonisation
  2. Reconstruction of Women’s Biographies
  3. Contextualisation of Gender Roles and Attributions
  4. Revaluation of Marginalised Topics
  5. Multiperspective Analysis
  6. Critical Reflection on Method and Technique
  7. Technological Openness
  8. Collaboration and Visibility of Contributions
  9. Reflective Practice of Creating Scholarly Editions
  10. Critical Awareness

What About the Common People’s Letters?

Two talks shifted the perspective away from scholarly, noble or otherwise select letter culture and expanded the discussion to include the letters of ordinary people. Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier) and I (Oslo) discussed emigrant letters from America; one focused on German emigrant letters, the other on Norwegian ones. We did not know we would discuss related topics, and the titles of both our talks did not convey enough; however, both emphasised the challenges and the considerable potential of data, especially authoritative data, for the common person.

While Lehmkuhl delivered an apologia for researching and preserving German emigrant letters, I focused on the importance of gathering ‘rich’ data on people about whom we usually know very little.

No Data for Common People?

When we work digitally with correspondences and their metadata, it is crucial to identify entities and compensate for different spellings of the same name, several people having similar names, or just tying the right person to their writing or receiving a letter (or their mention therein).

That is why we prefer to use so-called ‘authority data’ for named entities, such as persons, organisations, and places. Historically, we have had authority data for persons who were deemed important enough to be recorded or appear in records. And since it has been libraries, first and foremost, that have dealt with authority data, we often have good data about authors, but also, and especially, scholars, artists, musicians, and some people of public renown, such as politicians, statesmen, and the ruling classes and nobility. We do not, or very seldom, have authority data about common people, who only ever wrote privately, or not at all.

A good amount of the emigrant letters, though, are written by and sent to exactly these people: commoners, often from the lower social strata, not always fully literate (and thus dictating their letters). So, there would be no record for them in any library or cultural heritage institution, and, in many cases, only their name and a date on a letter is what we know about them.

This makes it challenging to deal with correspondence metadata; they become ‘flat’ and ambiguous. Flat, meaning there is no other information tied to that person that can be retrieved via linked data sources. Ambiguous, meaning the name ‘Elise Tvede’ is carried by more than one person in the same period and perhaps even in the same collection, and it becomes impossible to distinguish them unless other information is manually added.

The problem has been addressed by creating project-internal identifiers for each person and a small dataset, where, for example, spelling variations, essential dates, and other relationships can be stored and utilised within the project. This was the approach Lehmkuhl used in the project on German emigrant letters, in collaboration with the German Historical Institute in Washington, which houses a substantial collection of letters.

For the NorKorr project, the issue of a lack of authority data for correspondents has been known since the start. One of our very first datasets, Camilla Collett’s correspondence with her friend Emilie Diriks, had fully fledged authority data for the writer Collett, but nothing at all for Diriks, who never published anything. It became even more apparent in the small collection of Norwegian emigrant letters published on the Local History Wiki collection ‘Norgesbrev’, where none of the senders or recipients had any authority data associated with their names.

For our largest dataset, the eMunch correspondence, with more than 8.500 letters to Edvard Munch, there were disturbingly few senders who could be identified with existing authority data. Munch received an abundance of letters from all kinds of people all over the world, and some of them did not have any relation to Munch that could be used to identify them.

The Historical Population Register: A New Authority Data Resource

For Norwegian individuals in the NorKorr correspondence datasets, there may finally be a solution: Authority Data is now supplied for every historical Norwegian person, dating back to 1801. The Historical Population Register (HBR), developed and made available by the Norwegian Computing Centre in collaboration with the Arctic University of Tromsø and the National Archives, assigned a unique ID to each person with a connection to Norway based on historical census data and other sources, such as church registers.

By drawing on the interest and knowledge of lay historians (individuals interested in local and family history), the HBR quality checks and consolidates the IDs for people named in any of the digitised sources, assigning an HBR-ID that ties together all sources in which a person is mentioned by name. These data include information about names, name changes, gender, birth and death dates, changes of residence, religious affiliation, emigration, family relations, and other relevant details.

The HBR has an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows for the retrieval of rich data for every named entity. Lars Holden, the research director at the Norwegian Computing Centre and project lead for the Historical Population Register, says that it will still take some time and the efforts of many people to check and consolidate the large amounts of data produced by the National Archives during the mass digitisation of their collections. But it is more than promising how much and how thoroughly the ‘citizen scientists’ work on improving the data – and on integrating it into relevant Norwegian reference works, like the Local History Wiki, The Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and others.

From America to Norway – and into CorrespSearch

For the NorKorr project, our aim is:

  1. To enrich already existing datasets, like the correspondences from Bokselskap.no, from Lokalhistoriewiki and eMunch, with person data from HBR;
  2. To create a new dataset based on the printed seven-volume edition “From America to Norway: Norwegian Emigrant Letters 1838 to 1914” by Orm Øverland. For this dataset, we will utilise the CMIF Creator to add the HBR-IDs for every person mentioned, while also contributing to the consolidation and quality checking of the HBR entries.

This will likely take some time. However, in the spirit of citizen science, we will aim to arrange a metadata sprint for the task.

Will we be able to include all the information in the printed edition—1,733 letters—by the end of 2025? I don’t know, but I can hope.

For the time being, you may download and read my talk (in German) from the Zenodo archive: https://zenodo.org/records/15680957.

  1. Translated from German by me. I am not always sure I got it quite right. Hopefully, they will publish their talk for citeability. ↩︎

200 Years Letters from America

During a visit to the National Archives of Norway near beautiful Sognsvann Lake, I was gifted six out of the seven volumes of the Norwegian correspondence edition “Fra Amerika til Norge – i Norske utvandrerbrev 1838-1914”, letters from America to Norway—Norwegian emigrants’ letters 1838-1914 edited by Orm Øverland and Steinar Kjærheim.

The emigrants’ letters are a print-only scholarly edition. However, I deem it worthwhile to include them in the ever-growing collection of letter metadata, CorrespSearch, and open this jewel to a broader audience. We will use the CMIF creator to add the letters manually. Finding authority files for most correspondents will be challenging. They are mostly ordinary people, and thus, they are unlikely to be found in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) or Wikidata.

2025 is, in a way, the 200-year jubilee of the Norwegian emigration to Northern America. In 1825, the sailing ship “Restauration” left the harbour of Stavanger, heading toward New York with 52 souls on board. Between 1820 and 1920, around 800,000 Norwegians emigrated to America. Many sent letters back home, some of which have been kept and become part of the Amerika Letters edition.

For the summer, NorKorr is planning a collaboration with the Norwegian Institute for Local History (NLI), the Sustainable Digital Scholarly Editions Network, and the Department of Archaeology, Conservation, and History at the University of Oslo for an anniversary metadata sprint to add all letters from the Amerikabrev collection to CorrespSearch.

Will we register all letters and connect Norwegian emigrants to the international correspondence network? Stay tuned!

Dataset with metadata of 8.527 letters published!

A few weeks ago, we archived the first large dataset of correspondence metadata on the University of Oslo institutional repository, Dataverse.no. The dataset (“eMunch dataset”) contains metadata from 8.527 letters to and from Edvard Munch in the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF), an XML/TEI-based standard for correspondence metadata developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG and the team at Telota at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Letters.

The dataset has a digital object identifier (DOI), and it is licensed under CC0/Public Domain donation. You can download the dataset directly from Dataverse.no by following the link: https://doi.org/10.18710/TAFUSV. It is accompanied by a Readme file describing how the correspondence metadata was harvested, enriched, and transformed into the CMI format.

The eMunch dataset is derived from the digital scholarly edition of Edvard Munch’s Writings, eMunch.no, edited by Hilde Bøe at The Munch Museum, Oslo. Developer Loke Sjølie at the University of Oslo Library created a Python script to parse the XML files on eMunch.no and supplementary data files (Excel spreadsheet with updated dates, CSV file with GeoNames IDs for places) and extract the following metadata: sender’s name, receiver’s name, place name, date, and letter ID in the scholarly edition. These metadata were then converted into the Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF). The entire dataset has been integrated into the international CorrespSearch search service for scholarly editions of letters hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. It can be accessed via the CorrespSearch website.

To finish the eMunch correspondence metadata project, we will write a data paper to be published in the Journal of Open Humanities Data, which is planned for 2024.

11.000 Letters!

Yesterday, I checked the numbers while preparing a talk about the NorKorr project. We now have metadata from 8979 letters delivered to CorrespSearch, the correspondence metadata aggregator and search engine. There are another 2.409 letters in the pipeline, which we hope to deliver by the end of the year. This amounts to more than 11.000 letters – quite the achievement!

We started slowly in 2019 when my colleague Ellen Wiger added metadata from scholarly editions of correspondences from bokselskap.no, the Norwegian Society for Literature and Language’s publication outlet. We got our next “big” delivery when Ellen added two letter collections from lokalhistoriewiki.no, the wiki run by the Norwegian Institute for Local History. These were letters from Norwegian emigrants to their families back home and correspondence between Ivar Kleiven and Kristian Prestgaard.

In 2022, things sped up a bit: I applied for a small grant from the University of Oslo’s Teksthub+DH to hire a developer part-time for three months to help harvest the correspondence metadata from the Edvard Munch digital scholarly edition, eMunch.no. My colleague and head philologist at the Munch Museum, Hilde Bøe, wrote a blog post about how this project came into being and the challenges of extracting the metadata from it. We also presented the scripts our developer, Loke Sjølie, created for the task. At the end of 2022, we delivered the metadata of 8.527 letters from eMunch.no to CorrespSearch, where they were integrated into their ever-growing collection of letters. At the time of writing this post, there are 235.942 letters added to CorrespSearch that can be explored!

Right after the Edvard Munch correspondence had been harvested and the CMIF (Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format) files had been created, the Center for Ibsen Studies and the University of Oslo joined forces. They, in turn, hired Loke to harvest the correspondence metadata from the Henrik Ibsen Wiritngs Online edition, ibsen.uio.no. Both editions, eMunch.no and ibsen.uio.no, were similar enough to re-use the scripts Loke had created. The Ibsen correspondence metadata could be harvested with a simplified version of the Munch correspondence code. Enriching these with both GeoNames and VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) was necessary to fit into the CMIF data model and make them useful for CorrespSearch. There are still some minor issues around the Ibsen dataset; however, we plan to release the data CMIF-compliant by the end of the year.

There is more data from digital scholarly editions to be harvested. Several correspondences have been published on bokselskap.no, which haven’t yet been integrated into CorrespSearch. Namely, the correspondence between Sigrid Undset and Nini Roll Anker, Kitty Kielland and the family Lie, and Ebbe Hertzberg and Poul Andræ. There are also letters by Harriet Backer and Elisabeth Koren, published only recently.

Another more extensive collection of letters we intended to include right from the beginning of the project is the correspondence of Norwegian modernist painter Nikolai Astrup. KODE Bergen, the Art Museums and Composers’ Home, has recently published the catalogue of their Astrup collection, including some 400 pieces of correspondence in facsimile and transcription, including commentary and a translation into English. The archival collection with the letters can be browsed on the Nikolai Astrup website.

The next phase of NorKorr will be to gather correspondence metadata from printed editions. I have created a bibliography of 165 editions containing letters and correspondences. I will apply for another small grant to get these hand-coded into the CMIF format using the CorrespSearch CMIF Creator.

Edvard Munch in CorrespSearch

The NorKorr-eMunch project has delivered metadata of 8.527 letters to and from Edvard Munch to the CorrespSearch service. The letter metadata can be browsed on CorrespSearch.

This collection gathers most of Munch’s correspondence held in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, and contains all letters (including postcards) from the digital scholarly edition of Edvard Munch’s Writings, eMunch.no.

Loke Sjølie from the University of Oslo library developed the Python script to scrape the XML-TEI encoded letters from eMunch.no. It is available in the project’s GitHub repository.

The team will soon publish a data paper about the Munch correspondence and archive the CMIF (correspondence metadata interchange format) dataset of letter metadata on the University of Oslo’s data repository, dataverse.no.

A postcard from Ingse Vibe to Edvard Munch from 25th June 1906. The picture displays a beach scene with two people walking in the shallow water and a pier with a boat house at the end. The postcard is written and drawn on.
MM K 1198, p. 2. Munchmuseet. Letter from Ingse Vibe. Dated 25. 06. 1906.
https://emunch.no/K/full/No-MM_K1198-02.jpg