On Friday November 11th, 2011, the National Library of Wales hosted an Expert Seminar that scoped future development of the Welsh Wills online as a digital research resource with value to scholarship across the disciplines. The Seminar was organized by Dr. Elisabeth Salter (Department of English, Aberystwyth University) and Professor Lorna Hughes (University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections, National Library of Wales),and funded by the Aberystwyth University Research Fund and NLW.
In presentations, experts addressed the primary sources and the potential of digital history for research, methodologies for transcribing the probate records and issues in building a research resource that will enable text searching and analysis across the entire corpus of records. There was plenty of lively discussion throughout the day.
Digitising our past
Hilary Peters (Archives and Records, NLW) discussed the probate records at the National Library of Wales and their research potential. Dr Susan Davies (Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University) discussed some of the barriers to understanding wills, and the role of palaeography, common form and technical terms in learning to use the sources. Michael Pidd (University of Sheffield) presented the potential of digital approaches to a similar corpus of material, based on successful projects developed by the Humanities Research Institute at Sheffield University to developing and re-using the Old Bailey Online. At the core of making the digital records accessible is transcription, and Tim Causer discussed transcription of The Bentham Papers, University College, London, and the challenges and opportunities of crowdsourcing transcription of digitised historic records through the AHRC funded Transcribe Bentham Project.
A primary aim of the seminar was to identify key research challenges that can be addressed by digital humanities approaches. Don Spaeth (University of Glasgow) and Elisabeth Salter drew on their own research in this area to discuss the extent of the detail in probate records (focusing particularly on the last will and testament and the inventory elements of the probate material). They each stressed the immense value of taking a closer look at this detailed evidence indicating the ways that probate evidence can be used to understand much more about the kinds of goods people owned, the ways that these were perceived, the different processes by which goods are evaluated. While they each focused on goods in this instance they also both indicated that looking at the details of probate records also gives us access to a wide set of other issues such as occupations, affiliations, and kin and family networks.
Elisabeth gave some examples of the extent of the personal and descriptive detail which may be given in last will and testament documents, demonstrating the ways that these details give us a glimpse of the personal, intimate, or emotional life-stories behind some bequests: for example, those that make reference to intergenerational connections such as the father who describes the gift of his wife’s wedding ring to his son; the woman who bequeaths a gold ring to her friend who supported her during her time of sickness; the man who gives to his servant the small jewellery item which had belonged to that servant’s father. Individual will texts also construct their own hierarchies of bequest. A brass pot, for example, might be a very valuable item for one testator and be given therefore as a high value heirloom whereas to another testator, at the same date, the brass pot may be a humdrum element in a will that gives special significance to the garnish of pewter vessels: these distinctions in value may come about because of differing practices of giving and availabilities of goods in differing geographical regions.
Don Spaeth’s research focuses on the inventories associated with probate records. He described the possibilities for using semantic tagging to undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of the objects being listed in probate inventories. This enables us to understand more about the kinds economic value and the quantities of goods and stock owned by testators. Taking examples from 17th century Thame, he demonstrates the ways that tagging can be used to identify the percentages of specific kinds of goods given in one community, the popularity of specific descriptors (old, great, best, little &c), the ways these are used at different rates in wills and inventories, the gendered differentiations in the kinds of items identified and descriptors used
Additionally, Don proposed that a very fruitful area of qualitative research is the comparison between last will and testament and inventory documents, both of which describe the same kinds of items (e.g. tables, sheep) and that through comparison of the ways that these items are described in the different document contexts we might understand a lot more about how they are valued.
In the concluding discussion, participants agreed that an extremely qualitative approach could be very fruitful if it was possible to assess large quantities of last will and testament documents in order to assess patterns, habits, attitudes and practices across a number of geographical areas and across a long time frame: working with the large body of digitised data available in the National Library of Wales might indeed make this possible. The valuable contribution of digital humanities to these kinds of qualitative and quantitative investigations of detailed evidence was discussed, and the need for the right level of semantic tagging from the very start of the project to uncover the detail in documents: in the current climate of dealing with large data sets, sometimes this level of detail is being lost and that therefore this seems like a good moment to propose ways forward that might apply not only to probate records but also to other sets of data currently digitised and awaiting further analysis.
There will be a future workshop addressing transcription issues in greater detail in early 2012.
If you are interested in the project, please get in touch!
Dr Elisabeth Salter: els at aber.ac.uk
Prof Lorna Hughes: lorna.hughes at llgc.org.uk
Prof Lorna Hughes & Dr Elisabeth Salter