Entangled Histories: Making Ordinances Searchable

Entangled Histories: Making Ordinances Searchable

In the early modern era (± 1500-1800) Europe consisted of a patchwork of small states. The underlying hypothesis of this Entangled Histories-project is that those in government did not invent the wheel each and every single time a problem arose and were prone to copy parts of successful legislation from neighbouring states. Nowadays, European libraries and archives hold plakkaatboeken (books of ordinances): compilations of legislative texts issued from the 15th until the 18th century. These contain information on how governments of burgeoning states dealt a wide range of topics: from religion to waterworks, from marriage to economics. The hundreds of texts within these compilations are frequently consulted by researchers of various disciplines (e.g. law, history, political science, linguists) to understand how complex societies were controlled. Within Entangled Histories, nearly all digitally available books of ordinances of the Low Countries are used.

 (1) Entangled Histories commences with an improvement of the OCR through HTR-methods (Handwriting Text-Recognition) to obtain a  higher quality of recognition (CER<5%). After training the (2) page mark-up (3) machine-generated metadata is created after supervised training based on a Naive Bayes classifier.

This is a pilot that will prove the applicability of the tool to other languages as well, due to the presence of multiple languages. This project will disclose the entangled histories of neighbouring states, due to synchronic and diachronic comparisons – allowing a wider search and implementation in other multidisciplinary projects within Europe.