Entangled histories : datafication of printed books of ordinances in the Low Countries (1550-1800s)

mardi23février2021

12:3014:00

Conférence et cycle

Entangled histories : datafication of printed books of ordinances in the Low Countries (1550-1800s)

Présentation

L’invention de l’imprimé a permis aux autorités politiques de l’époque moderne d’avoir un nouveau moyen de communiquer les décisions qu’elles prenaient. Cette situation n’est pas exempte de paradoxe. Alors que les autorités politiques et ecclésiastiques se sont appropriées ce moyen pour communiquer leurs décisions, elles ont aussi été enclines à considérer l’imprimé comme dangereux. L’utilisation de l’imprimé par les autorités politiques à l’époque moderne soulève un nombre considérable de questions et ouvre la voie à de nombreuses recherches à la fois en histoire du livre et de l’imprimé, que dans le domaine de l’histoire politique, l’histoire institutionnelle ou l’histoire du droit.
L’objectif de ce wébinaire international est de mettre en lumière les multiples usages de l’imprimé par les autorités politiques aux 16^e et 17^e siècles. Ce sera aussi l’occasion de montrer les articulations importantes entre oralité, écriture et imprimé à cette époque.

Over time, there have been various ways of collecting early modern ordinances. At the time itself, the compilations focused on the administrative and legal practices – and functioned as useful books of reference. From the 1840s onwards, archives aided by – mostly legal – specialists collected all sorts of ordinances and placed these in volumes. From the 1950s researchers started to get involved in the whole process and added letters, resolutions and somethings even petitions to the whole scope of collected sources.

With the possibilities Digital Humanitities bring, another means of compiling collections of ordinances appears. The project Entangled Histories used the early modern printed normative texts. The computer used to have significant problems in reading Dutch Gothic print or even Dutch Roman print, which is used in many of the sources. Using the Handwritten Text Recognition suite Transkribus, the Entangled Histories-team reprocessed the original scans with poor quality OCR, obtaining a Character Error Rate (CER) much lower than our initial expectations of <5% CER. This result is a significant improvement that enables the searching through 75,000 pages of printed normative texts from 108 books originating from the seventeen provinces.

Each text (norm) in the books concerns one or more topics or categories. A selection of normative texts was manually labelled with internationally used (hierarchical) categories. Using Annif, a tool for automatic subject indexing, the computer was trained to apply the categories by itself. Automatic metadata makes it easier to search relevant texts and allows further analysis.

This presentation will talk about the steps taken into the pilot study of datafication (data-extraction) of early modern ordinances and what possibilities this will offer in the (near) future.