Women of paper: digitising and accessing Gezelle’s correspondence with women
Multi-talented Flemish priest, Guide Gezelle, in addition to his poetry and teaching, also maintained active correspondence with many people, for example exchanging letters with 200 women both at home and abroad. In their often candid messages, they sought advice on personal matters or contributed to Gezelle’s literary work. This unexplored female heritage is now being digitised and made accessible, thanks to an initiative by the Guido Gezelle Archive (which belongs to our content partner, Bruges Public Library). This is primarily taking place via the GezelleBrOn online platform, on gezelle.be (link in Dutch), and also in an exhibition and publication in Guido Gezelle Year 2024.
Challenge
Gezelle kept no fewer than 7000 of these letters, which don’t only provide fascinating insights into his life and work, but also offer a profile of a cross-section of society in the second half of the 19th century. The Guido Gezelle Archive, where the majority of this extensive correspondence is kept, is aiming to create a complete online text edition of this corpus in collaboration with partners and volunteers. This is a considerable task, which is why we ran several participatory sub-projects to take care of it.
Following Gezelle’s correspondence with members of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL), teachers from the Bruges Sint-Lodewijks College and Bruges printers, we’re now dealing with his correspondence with female contemporaries. We’re aiming here to address the lack of gender-historical sources and help restore some balance between men and women in biographical databases and sources.
Our role
As a partner in this project, we’re providing guidance and support to the Guido Gezelle Archive. At the same time, we’re also further developing our own expertise, which we will then be able to use to assist other organisations.
We’re supporting this project by:
providing advice on optimising the (meta)data and preparing the digital files;
ensuring the long-term preservation of the letters in the meemoo archive system after digitising them;
assisting in incorporating data from Guido Gezelle Archive’s register of people in Wikidata and writing Wikipedia pages about a number of notable women included in it. This will help to bridge the gender gap on Wikipedia.
Approach
PHASE 1 (October 2022 - September 2023)
The first phase primarily involved uploading data to Wikidata and writing Wikipedia pages. In total, we’ve created and enriched 464 Wikidata records:
380 records about women – Find the overview here (link in Dutch);
275 records about men (link in Dutch). This was necessary because the records for the women often contain names of male spouses, children or teachers, for example. We were only able to add this information in Wikidata by linking it to records of men that we either enriched or created.
In some cases, we had to create or add information to Wikidata records about other information entities, such as the female correspondent’s school, monastic order or employer.
We also took this opportunity to upload data about some of Gezelle’s other correspondents at the same time. This concerns:
150 records about correspondents who were teachers at Sint-Lodewijks College (link in Dutch)
94 Wikidata records about correspondents who were members of KANTL (link in Dutch)
20 records about printers in Bruges (link in Dutch)
809 records about other correspondents (link in Dutch)
In total, we created or enriched in this phase at least 1,333 unique Wikidata records about Guido Gezelle’s letter correspondents, taking into account overlap between different groups of correspondents. At the same time, we also greatly enriched the Wikidata record on Guido Gezelle himself, for example by establishing links with hundreds of his letter correspondents. Altogether, between 31/01/2023 and 28/09/2023, we did more than 51,300 edits in Wikidata as part of this project.
Uploading data about individuals to Wikidata means it becomes linked, open and available to a wide range of users, who in turn can then enrich it further. We often use data about individuals from Wikidata ourselves, such as for the Public Domain Tool (in the DO IT! project) and our projects on facial recognition (such as FAME and GIVE metadata).
With a view to the digitisation process in the next phase, we have also provided advice on naming the digitised files.
PHASE 2 (October 2023 - September 2024)
During phase 2, we will continue to add to the data on Wikidata. Moreover, using SPARQL, a query language that allows you to query data, we will create visualisations of it.
In addition, we are preparing the inclusion of the digitised letters in the meemoo archive system.
PARTNERS
There is a large group of partners involved in this Flanders-funded project. The main partners are:
The Guido Gezelle Archive, Bruges Public Library
The Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL)
The Guido Gezelle Society
Gezelle expert Prof. Dr. Piet Couttenier (ISLN University of Antwerp)
We also regularly consult with Wikimedia Belgium.