They were accidentally discovered in the National Archives in London in 1980:thousands of handwritten letters from Dutch ships captured by the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unique research material for historians and linguists alike, as few personal documents have survived from this period.
Until now, only a small part of these letters had been published by researchers, for example in the Letters of the month at the Leiden project Letters as booty. That is now about to change:thanks to the work of a large number of volunteers, 3000 transcribed letters will be made available to everyone on the internet next week. Just as many more will be added before the end of the year.
This is not only good news for researchers, interested laymen can also visit the website to learn more about their family history, for example.
Abbreviations
110 volunteers have been transcribing (accurately retyping) the letters since December 1, 2011. They are supervised in this by Nicoline van der Sijs, researcher at the Meertens Institute:“Most volunteers had gained some experience or a history that enabled them to read the hard-to-read manuscripts. A small group of ten people with a lot of expertise made the correction:they did an enormous amount of work.”
With an editor . developed at the Meertens Institute many people could work on the letters at the same time. Such a large-scale form of crowdsourcing, in which the public is involved in the research and carrying out tasks for which researchers have no options during their working hours, is relatively new for the Netherlands.
What makes the documents so difficult to read is not only the carelessness (or inexperience) of the manuscripts and their poor condition (many letters have been rolled up, occasionally there are holes in them), explains the researcher, but also the large number of abbreviations in the texts:"The volunteers did their utmost to find out what those abbreviations stand for. In the transcripts, the translations are always placed in brackets, so you can see that it is an interpretation. For example, DGG is often used for the fixed formula D(ie) G(od) G(eleide), and one uses m. for both the old moisture measure muts if the country measure tomorrow, but also for brand and makes :“It can sometimes be quite a puzzle to find out what is meant.”
Metadata
The volunteers not only translated the letters, but also added so-called metadata. These are data such as year, text type, sender and addressee. This metadata makes it easier to search the letters database, so that everyone can put their own questions to the material. Van der Sijs:"You can say:give me all the letters and put them in chronological order, or:give me all the letters from a certain ship, from a certain sender or sent to a certain captain."
Letters have been transcribed and made accessible to the general public before, but never in this order of magnitude. Moreover, it often concerns fragments from the letters, in which a lot of background information is given. Van der Sijs:“Our goal was to unlock the total amount of available scans, both on the basis of a transcript and metadata, so that laymen and researchers no longer have to read difficult manuscripts and can quickly search through the data.”
Language
At the Meertens Institute, this corpus will in any case be integrated into Nederlab:a database in which all digitized texts that are important for the history of the Dutch language and culture will be brought together. This will enable a linguist, for example, to investigate to what extent the language use of these handwritten egodocuments from the 17 e and 18 e century differs from printed texts from the same period.
Van der Sijs:“Now that we have such a large text file, we can also compare the language used with diaries or egodocuments written by Dutch people who have settled on other continents. For example, many documents have been preserved in the former New Amsterdam (New York). Has the language used by Dutch people in the US changed, and if so:in what respects and how quickly has this happened? Nowadays there are computer programs that can find the differences and similarities in texts, provided the text files are large enough. I am very curious what new insights this type of text-comparison research will yield in the future.”
Business Mail
The (research) material that has become available is very varied in nature. About half of the letters are business mail, the researcher knows:“Think of waybills and financial statements, which are relevant for economic historians, for example. There are also entire plantation lists from Suriname with information about cash books, how many negroes there were, how much they earned with them. It's not that we don't know anything about it now, but this is a very nice additional source."
The letters are also written by people from all walks of life. In addition to letters from and to crew members of the ship, the corpus also contains correspondence outside of it, explains Van der Sijs:“Consider, for example, someone who had a plantation in the East and lived there temporarily. When he wanted to send a letter to his relatives, he gave it to the captain of the ship:'You are sailing back to Enkhuizen now? Then take this letter for my wife."
Other languages
Incidentally, there is still a wealth of material in the archives in Kew (London). There are now 9000 scans in the Netherlands (about 6000 of which are made accessible; the rest has no text), but the other letters have never been photographed. It is not known exactly how many letters are involved, according to Van der Sijs:“Numbers of 38,000 are always mentioned, but that is an estimate. That estimate comes from Roelof van Gelder, who made an inventory at the time. He's done that very seriously, but he hasn't opened boxes that say they come from Danish or French ships, for example. We know that those boxes often contain Dutch texts.”
“The letters we now have here are also partly in German, French, Spanish and Italian. Not all of these are immediately available on the website:correcting them is a bit more difficult because we have fewer volunteers who can read those manuscripts. But we certainly hope to have made all the material available early next year.”
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