Fanny loves Wilhelm. Transcriptions of letters by Fanny Mendelssohn to Wilhelm Hensel

Overview

In 2024, the Berlin State Library and Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin organized a seminar focused on the letters and notes exchanged between the composer and pianist Fanny Mendelssohn and her later husband, Wilhelm Hensel.

Within the seminar, the participants transcribed 122 letters by Fanny Mendelssohn contained in two folders held by the State Library Berlin.

The dataset consists of two zip-files containing the transcriptions (in PAGE, ALTO and a basic TEI format) for the two folders (see below for related digitized objects). The dataset contains transcriptions of 250 pages (some of them without text) and 2240 lines of text.

Transcription Process

The transcriptions are based on the digital images within the Digitized Collections of the Berlin State Library. Images were automatically segmented in eScriptorium using the kraken default segmentation model (blla.mlmodel). Layout analysis was then corrected manually. Transcriptions were done manually and checked for quality. During transcription, original graphemes (like long s <ſ>), abbreviations and the like where kept as is, wherever possible. 

Page and Alto files where exported from eScriptorium and additional metadata was added via XSLT. The dataset contains one (ALTO or PAGE) file per page, regardless of whether there is transcribed text on that page.

TEI files were generated via XSLT from the PAGE files. There is one TEI file per folder; individual letters are wrapped in a <div type="letter"> element.

Potential Uses

This dataset contains transcriptions of 2240 lines of text in a single hand and in German Kurrent script. It can be used to add training data for training HTR models. A specific model fine-tuned on Fanny Mendelssohn's handwriting was trained during the project and will be published separately.

The transcriptions pertain to intimate and fast-paced letters dating from 1829; potential uses include linguistic analyses of intimate correspondence and epistolary exchanges of that period.

Furthermore, the textual content of these transcriptions can help to further enhance biographical studies on Fanny Mendelssohn, her husband and family. The transcriptions, particularly the TEI files, could also be used as starting point for a digital edition or further semantic annotation of the correspondence.

Contributions

We thank all participants of the seminar for their work and transcriptions as well as Prof. Susanne Fontaine for valuable input and convening the seminar.