Chroniclers are the bloggers of their time
In conversation with Erika Kuijpers Lecturer in Early Modern History
The weather, grain prices, newspaper reports, local highs and lows or the effects of a flood — a small selection of the subjects that earlier chroniclers found worthwhile recording for posterity.
“Chroniclers are the bloggers of their time”, says Erika Kuijpers. “They were well-to-do citizens, often men, who considered themselves important enough to write down local history.” For Kuijpers and her team, the chronicles formed the basis of a unique project. To do this, they used automatic handwriting recognition. A computer model was trained with texts transcribed by volunteers. This resulted in an online data collection with more than 22 million words, more than 200 chronicles that are comprehensively searchable by everyone.
Watch this video to see how the project was set up:
Painstaking work
“This would not have been possible twenty years ago”, says Kuijpers. “Just the scanning with a mobile phone has already made the job so much easier, and the handwriting recognition has saved us an enormous amount of time.”
The team used the data collection to find out how early modern humans dealt with new knowledge. “The beauty of the chronicles is that they have existed for a very long time”, says Kuijpers. “As a result, we were able to visualise the period 1500-1850 and really get closer to people's experiences.”
Old-fashioned handwork still played a major role in this. “The volunteers manually annotated the chroniclers' sources of information for part of the corpus. That was painstaking work, but necessary to be able to use the data collection.”
“Twenty years ago, this research would have been impossible.”
Fake news
Kuijpers cannot reveal everything just yet. “We have two PhD students who still need to present their research results. What I can say is that great new scientific insights from the 17th and 18th centuries are gradually changing people's worldview and that old explanatory models for natural phenomena, for example, those in which the hand of God is emphatically present, appear to be perfectly compatible with new scientific ones.
Furthermore, it is remarkable to see how much the role of the media resembles that of today. In times of crisis, a huge rumor mill is set in motion and there is a lot of fake news. The need for authority and reliable sources of information is very great and you see people complaining about all the nonsense that is going on. They suffer from what we now call information overload, and then you see that oral sources are still super important. People you trust.”
“Handwriting recognition has saved us a lot of time.”
Future
“Ideally, I would like the chronicles to be integrated into the expanding infrastructure for the Humanities, to continue unlocking them. For linguists, for example, this online data collection is super interesting because it contains a great deal of language variation, spans over a long period of time, and covers many regions. Additional material can still be added." She concludes by saying: “Of course, it's fantastic that we can do this, and future language models will be even better at reading archival material.”
About Erika Kuijpers
Erika Kuijpers teaches early modern history of the Netherlands. She is coordinator of the Master's in History programme and coordinates the minor in Digital Humanities and Social Analytics. In 2005, she earned her PhD with her thesis titled Migrant City. Immigration and Social Relations in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. Erika is a member of the editorial board of Geschiedenis Magazine.
magazine for humanities alumni june 2024