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
- Critical Engagement with Textual Tradition and De-canonisation
- Reconstruction of Women’s Biographies
- Contextualisation of Gender Roles and Attributions
- Revaluation of Marginalised Topics
- Multiperspective Analysis
- Critical Reflection on Method and Technique
- Technological Openness
- Collaboration and Visibility of Contributions
- Reflective Practice of Creating Scholarly Editions
- 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:
- To enrich already existing datasets, like the correspondences from Bokselskap.no, from Lokalhistoriewiki and eMunch, with person data from HBR;
- 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.
- Translated from German by me. I am not always sure I got it quite right. Hopefully, they will publish their talk for citeability. ↩︎