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.