John Adams died on 4 July 1826 at the ripe old age of 90. His death falls slightly more than halfway through the Adams Papers slip file, but when we reached this date in Encoding Level 2 last summer, we felt we'd marked an important milestone in the project. So in honor of John Adams, I've compiled some statistics related to him.
As of now, John Adams appears in the database as an author 13,943 times. He appears as a recipient 11,782 times. These numbers reflect original letters, retained letterbook copies of outgoing correspondence, and other documents. While the MHS holds the vast majority of these items, the slip file lists all known Adams family manuscripts, including those held by other institutions and those in private hands.
The earliest extant letter from John was written at Worcester on 1 Sep. 1755 to Nathan Webb. The first letter John received was written by Richard Cranch in Oct. 1756.
Correspondence between John and Abigail Adams accounts for 1,376 records in the database. Ironically, although Abigail often complained of how little John wrote, he wrote many more letters to her than she did to him--an impressive 912 to her 464 (including letterbook copies). John's first letter to his future wife was written 4 Oct. 1762, two years before their marriage, and her first letter to him was written 11 Aug. 1763.
According to the slip file, John Adams exchanged 662 letters with his "frenemy" Thomas Jefferson--376 to him and 286 from him. Their correspondence spans almost 50 years, beginning with Jefferson's letter from Williamsburg, Va. on 16 May 1777 and ending with Adams' of 17 Apr. 1826, less than three months before the day both men died.
John Adams wrote his last letter on 22 June 1826 to Roger C. Weightman, at that time the mayor of Washington, D.C. Four days later, the last letter to John was written by Ebenezer Clough. It was one of only three letters Clough ever wrote to the former president.
Showing posts with label Recipient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recipient. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
What's in a name tag?
We started Encoding Level 2 in late April 2010 and this process continued until November. In Level 2, the focus was on names as well as data appearing within the <title> tag. An XSLT was created to automate much of this, so that in an author or recipient tag, each instance of JA, AA, JQA, etc. was automatically converted to "adams-john1735", "adams-abigail1744", "adams-john-quincy1767", etc. For non-Adams correspondents, Thomas Jefferson was flipped to "jefferson-thomas", etc. Would that it be this consistent the whole way through the project! While this did a lot of the work it did not count for all the variables that are inherent in a collection the size of the Adams Papers. For text within the <title> tag we added the information from scratch.
The XLST looked for the text within an author or recipient tag and flipped them around. If contained a recipient tag, an additional rule was created to skip the word "to" which always appears and thus take the second and the last word within the tag. For example,
Sounds easy, right? After the first few weeks we got into the grove and we learned tricks, what to look for, etc. On average a reel took maybe four or five days, depending on the number of records and any significant events such as deaths, wars, and the like. As I said above, we were very literal in the process of creating name authorities not all of us are Adams experts. A fine example of this is T. B. Johnson. T. B. Johnson signed many of his letters as T. B. Johnson. He also signed them Thomas B. Johnson. And, there were a few that were Thomas Baker Johnson. But, he is likely not the only T. B. Johnson in the history of the world, so it is difficult to determine if they are one in the same or different people. So currently all three variants exist in the database which could make searching kind of difficult and not exhaustive. Frequently in a run of letters we were able to determine that T. B. was indeed Thomas Baker, and so in cases like this we felt comfortable changing an instance of T. B. Johnson to the fuller Thomas Baker Johnson. However, if we could not conclusively determine that it was indeed Thomas Baker Johnson, we left it alone and one of the Adams editors can make that change.
More examples...
Letters with multiple authors and/or recipients were a little complicated, as well as letters addressed generally to someone by their title/position/office.
So, after Level 1 a sample multiple author tag appeared as:
After we ran the schema and did some house cleaning, it was transformed to look like this:
Where a letter was addressed to someone by their title/office etc., after Level 1, a sample recipient tag looked this way:
After the XSLT was run, it looked like this:
You can see that that transformation skipped the word "to" and then looked at the next word and the last word. Once we reviewed the records and conducted a little research, it thus became this:
Simple beauty!
As of right now, the names database contains 19,454 names. We have yet to systematically clean up possible duplicates like Johnson example above, or instances where the names were spelled different in America than in, say, the Netherlands. Fortunately these are exceptions and not the rule, so the process should go smoothly. A lot more needs to be said about Encoding Level 2 and I'm sure I didn't touch on many of the aspects of our process. But hopefully this post gives a little flavor as to the goings-on at the Massachusetts Historical Society during the spring, summer, and fall of 2010.
The XLST looked for the text within an author or recipient tag and flipped them around. If contained a recipient tag, an additional rule was created to skip the word "to" which always appears and thus take the second and the last word within the tag. For example,
<recipient>to HA</recipient>was converted to
<recipient><ref target="adams-henry1838" type="person">to HA</ref></recipient>.And
<recipient>to Simeon Andinwooll</recipient>was converted to
<recipient><ref target="andinwooll-simeon" type="person">to the HA</ref></recipient>.It should be clear also that all attributes were automatically converted to all lower case. Ultimately, this was correctly applied to the majority of records, but there were anomalies and thus the style sheet introduced also some bad attributes. For example, Classifying the type "person" was the default, so for offices, corporations, etc. we had to manually fix the type attribute. Those individuals who went by their initials (E. W. Dodge) posed another set of issues; we were very literal in our transcription of the data on the original slip files (which in its turn is faithful to the original document), so unless E. W. Dodge was defined as, for example Eliphalet Winchester, he (assumed) is confined to the anonymity of how his (assumed) name was signed.
Sounds easy, right? After the first few weeks we got into the grove and we learned tricks, what to look for, etc. On average a reel took maybe four or five days, depending on the number of records and any significant events such as deaths, wars, and the like. As I said above, we were very literal in the process of creating name authorities not all of us are Adams experts. A fine example of this is T. B. Johnson. T. B. Johnson signed many of his letters as T. B. Johnson. He also signed them Thomas B. Johnson. And, there were a few that were Thomas Baker Johnson. But, he is likely not the only T. B. Johnson in the history of the world, so it is difficult to determine if they are one in the same or different people. So currently all three variants exist in the database which could make searching kind of difficult and not exhaustive. Frequently in a run of letters we were able to determine that T. B. was indeed Thomas Baker, and so in cases like this we felt comfortable changing an instance of T. B. Johnson to the fuller Thomas Baker Johnson. However, if we could not conclusively determine that it was indeed Thomas Baker Johnson, we left it alone and one of the Adams editors can make that change.
More examples...
Letters with multiple authors and/or recipients were a little complicated, as well as letters addressed generally to someone by their title/position/office.
So, after Level 1 a sample multiple author tag appeared as:
<author>JA, B. Franklin, J. Jay, H. Laurens, and T. Jefferson.</author>
After we ran the schema and did some house cleaning, it was transformed to look like this:
<author> <ref target="adams-john1735" type="person">JA</ref>, <ref type="person" target="franklin-benjamin">B. Franklin</ref>, <ref type="person" target="jay-john">J. Jay</ref>, <ref type="person" target="laurens-henry">H. Laurens</ref>, and <ref type="person" target="jefferson-thomas">T. Jefferson</ref>.</author>
Where a letter was addressed to someone by their title/office etc., after Level 1, a sample recipient tag looked this way:
<recipient>to the President of Congress</recipient>
After the XSLT was run, it looked like this:
<recipient><ref target="congress-the" type="person">to the President of Congress</ref></recipient>
You can see that that transformation skipped the word "to" and then looked at the next word and the last word. Once we reviewed the records and conducted a little research, it thus became this:
<recipient><ref target="huntington-samuel" type="person">to the President of Congress</ref></recipient>.
Simple beauty!
As of right now, the names database contains 19,454 names. We have yet to systematically clean up possible duplicates like Johnson example above, or instances where the names were spelled different in America than in, say, the Netherlands. Fortunately these are exceptions and not the rule, so the process should go smoothly. A lot more needs to be said about Encoding Level 2 and I'm sure I didn't touch on many of the aspects of our process. But hopefully this post gives a little flavor as to the goings-on at the Massachusetts Historical Society during the spring, summer, and fall of 2010.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Master Encoding Guide: Recipient
Record Content: Recipient
<recipient>
Most records consist of an author and a recipient. The author is loosely defined as any text before the first instance of the word "to." The recipient, then, is any text following the first instance of the word "to." The vendor was instructed to include all text following "to" in the recipient tag. Frequently, the text following a recipient’s name includes statements about content, enclosures or references to other letters. During Encoding Level 2, these other elements will be separately tagged. The recipient element includes the same child elements as the author element, that is, <person>, <corporate>, and <office>. The same guidelines and rules apply to these child elements as in the author element (see above). In addition there are three child elements may also be used in <recipient>.
<enclosure>
A letter often includes enclosures. The text of the record will expressly state that an "enclosure" is included. These may also contain a target reference to another letter and there may be multiple references. These are tagged with <ref @target>.
<content>
Similar to an enclosure statement, the recipient text block may also include a note regarding content. This is a child element of the recipient element.
<ref>
There may also appear miscellaneous references to other documents or persons that can be tagged with a <ref> tag with a target to a separate directory or separate document.
Example:
<recipient>to <person target="washingtongeorge">George Washington</person>: <content>Opinion re salaries of American diplomats,</content> with several <enclosure>enclosures (in which are found, on p. 9-10, copy of <ref target="000000">JA to John Jay, 13 May 1785,</ref> & on p. 10, copy of <ref target="00000"> John Jay to JA, 3 Aug. 1785)</ref></enclosure></recipient>
<recipient>
Most records consist of an author and a recipient. The author is loosely defined as any text before the first instance of the word "to." The recipient, then, is any text following the first instance of the word "to." The vendor was instructed to include all text following "to" in the recipient tag. Frequently, the text following a recipient’s name includes statements about content, enclosures or references to other letters. During Encoding Level 2, these other elements will be separately tagged. The recipient element includes the same child elements as the author element, that is, <person>, <corporate>, and <office>. The same guidelines and rules apply to these child elements as in the author element (see above). In addition there are three child elements may also be used in <recipient>.
<enclosure>
A letter often includes enclosures. The text of the record will expressly state that an "enclosure" is included. These may also contain a target reference to another letter and there may be multiple references. These are tagged with <ref @target>.
<content>
Similar to an enclosure statement, the recipient text block may also include a note regarding content. This is a child element of the recipient element.
<ref>
There may also appear miscellaneous references to other documents or persons that can be tagged with a <ref> tag with a target to a separate directory or separate document.
Example:
<recipient>to <person target="washingtongeorge">George Washington</person>: <content>Opinion re salaries of American diplomats,</content> with several <enclosure>enclosures (in which are found, on p. 9-10, copy of <ref target="000000">JA to John Jay, 13 May 1785,</ref> & on p. 10, copy of <ref target="00000"> John Jay to JA, 3 Aug. 1785)</ref></enclosure></recipient>
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Encoding Guide. Recipient
Record: RECIPIENT
Most records will have a recipient name (or initials) that follows the word “to.” All text following—and including—the first instance of the word “to” should be coded as <to>.
<to>to Abigail Adams</to>
<to>to the President of Congress</to>
<to>to the town of Braintree</to>
<to>to the Peace Commissioners</to>
Most records will have a recipient name (or initials) that follows the word “to.” All text following—and including—the first instance of the word “to” should be coded as <to>.
<to>to Abigail Adams</to>
<to>to the President of Congress</to>
<to>to the town of Braintree</to>
<to>to the Peace Commissioners</to>
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