Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Happy new year!

As a new year begin we would like to look back on the year we have just left behind.

In February 2020 some of the project participants met for a project workshop at the University Library of Oslo. During the workshop we made quite ambitious plans for 2020, but sadly the covid pandemic has made it difficult to do everything we intended to, and the conferences we wanted to attend had to be postponed.

However, 2020 was not a bad year for the NorKorr project after all:

In 2021 we hope to send more CMIFs to CorrespSearch and we also hope to submit at least one paper proposal. But most of all we hope that the pandemic will end so that the project participants can meet face to face again.

Stay safe!

Who wrote to whom, when, and where? About NorKorr on Historieblogg.no

Ellen and Annika have written about the NorKorr project on the Norwegian academic blog Historieblogg.no – a weblog hosted and edited by the Norwegian Institute for Local History. With examples from correspondences by Camilla Collett, Kitty Kielland, and Kristian Prestgard and a brief overview of the data model and encoding standards.

Read the full article (in Norwegian) on Historieblogg.no:

The Norwegian Institute of Local history (NLI): Norgesbrev and Kleiven-Prestgard correspondance

The latest additions to the NorKorr corpus are letters from The Norwegian Institute of Local history (NLI). The Institute’s main purpose is to promote local and regional historical activity in Norway. NLI is responsible for the websites lokalhistorie.no, lokalhistoriewiki.no and historieblogg.no, and publishes sources and handbooks, as well as other aids for historians. NLI also organises seminars and conferences related to local history topics.

Norgesbrev

Lokalhistoriewiki has a large collection of so-called “Norgesbrev”, that is letters sent from Norway to friends and family who had emigrated to North America. 85 of these letters have been transcribed, (the transcriptions are available – in Norwegian – at the Lokalhistoriewiki website), and metadata from these transkriptions is now intergrated in the CorrespSearch interface.

Correspondance: Ivar Kleiven and Kristian Prestgard

The letters between Ivar Kleiven (1854-1934) and Kristian Prestgard (1866-1946) have also been added to the NorKorr corpus and metadata is now searchable at correspsearch.net.

The  Norwegian politician, historian and poet Ivar Kleiven (1854-1934) from Vågå and the journalist Kristian Prestgard (1866-1946) from Heidal met at Telemark Folkehøgskule in 1885–86. Kleiven lived in Vågå all his live, but Prestgard emigrated, first to Denmark and in 1893 to America. They met only once after Prestgard left, in the summer of 1927, but they wrote to each other – about work, culture, home life, politics and more.

From XML to CMIF

The aim of the NorKorr project is to aggregate and provide correspondence metadata from Norwegian editions of correspondences from different projects, institutions and collections in a format that can be ingested by CorrespSearch.

So far we have included metadata from 12 digital editions (approximately 400 letters) in CorrespSearch . Among them are letters from National Library in Norway’s source edition series NB kilder and letters from other e-books published at bokselskap.no.

All of the letters are encoded in TEI P5 XML. To get the letters registered and integrated into the CorrespSearch web service we create a CMIF file based on the metadata already recorded in the correspDesc element in our XML files. The CMI format used by CorrespSearch is developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG and is a reduced subset of the TEI Guidelines and the TEI element correspDesc.

Digital edition, bokselskap.no
Example from the CMIF file

Zotero Group Library

The NorKorr-team has been collecting publications about Norwegian letters, letter writing as a cultural practice, letter collections, editions of letters as well as articles and guidelines on how to scholarly edit and encode letters, postcards, telegrams, etc. in a Zotero group library.

As of today, NorKorr has released the collaborative library for public view. You can access the library here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2214573/norkorr/library.

We are open for collaboration, which means if you are working on Norwegian correspondences or letters or a related subject and you want to make full use of our library (e.g. the collected pdfs, links, and other materials in full text), you can join the group. You will need a Zotero user profile for this (you can get one here, it doesn’t cost anything and Zotero takes good care of your data).

If you are using the resources in the NorKorr group library, we would appreciate if you credit us:

Norwegian Correspondences Bibliography. Ed. by Annika Rockenberger, Ellen N. Wiger, Hilde Bøe, Philipp Conzett, Mette Witting, Nina Evensen and Ruth Sander. Oslo 2018–. URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2214573/norkorr.