Table of Contents
2. Preparation of the Collection for Digitization
3. Frautschi Family Letters Virtual Archive: The Sources
This guide documents the activities on a digital archive project that originated from a course in Library and Information Studies Department (University of Wisconsin-Madison), LIS839 Special Collections in the Digital Environment, offered by Marija Dalbello in Spring 2000. One of the assignments in the course involved digitization of a historical collection of letters written by members of the Frautschi Family. The members of the family immigrated from Switzerland in the mid-19th century and have ever since been prominent in Madison business and social life. The Frautschi papers, related to business and private life of the members of this family, are held by the Max Kade Institute and the Wisconsin State Historical Society. The letters for this project (dating from 1852 to 1904) were provided by the Max Kade Institute (The University of Wisconsin-Madison). The significance of these letters is for understanding the social, political and cultural life of the 19th century Wisconsin from a very intimate, personal perspective of an immigrant family and its members who have retained strong ties to their European roots. They reveal a quintessentially Wisconsinite, local flavor, and speak about the European immigrant experience through various stages of acculturation. Central in this letter group are letters by Christian Frautschi, who is one among three brothers who emigrated from rural Switzerland (Turbach), carpenter by trade, to become an artisan in the New World. Although he himself has not been involved in the whirlwind of political turmoil that swept Europe in 1848, he has been a contemporary, unique individual who was so typical of those vibrant masses of youthful Europeans who left their home to settle in a land that was perceived as being open to political and personal freedom, and economic opportunity. These fragments of written evidence bring to life a person, a life story and a time. It epitomizes the approach in historical scholarship that focuses on the history of the people rather than political history of the political elites. The development of this Virtual Archive is driven by the overarching philosophy of post-modern history, which builds history from the experinces of grassroots individuals. The components of this Virtual archive emerge from two student assignments. The first requires to build a context for the letters which students developed working in several groups on the Wisconsin Mosaic. The second involved tagging of letters using SGML (TEI compliant) for a browsable archive of letters.
2. Preparation of the Collection for Digitization
The Tagging Guide for this project aims to document the use of SGML to tag a historical collection (MKI/Frautschi3). The collection includes two groups of letters and an excerpt of a diary of Christian Frautschi. The stage of actual digitization has been preceded by months of preparatory work by the instructor of the course and the staff of Max Kade Institute. The preparation activities for the project started in October 1999, with the application for a grant to support preparation of the collection for digitization and technical support for the course and meetings with Max Kade Institute staff. Under the guidance of Max Kade Institute librarian Annie Reinhardt, several preparation procedures had to be undertaken at that time.
2.1. Notation
Developing unique identifiers for each of the item in the collection MKI/Frautschi3 (Max Kade Institute, Frautschi Family Collection, Box 3) involved developing a notation which provided identification of each item, and is at the same time appropriate for the file management of the digital library. The notation expressed the origin, year and relationship of the original (master) and its derivatives. For example, letter bearing notation A1855 was written by Abraham Frautschi in 1855; its transcription from old German is identified as A1855G, and the English translation of the letter is identified as A1855E. Because the Frautschi Letters Digital Archive provides access to several surrogates: two scanned images of the master, the text of the transcription (in Swiss-German), and the text of the English translation, even for a small number of letters in this collection, file management can get rather involved.
2.2. Preservation of the Masters
The provenance for each letter was established and they were ordered in logical groups. Storing originals in stable preservation environment (including acid-free folders, and protection covers for letters) and the work on matching the existing transliterations and translations with the originals has started. The letters that needed transliteration and translation were identified and translated, to provide the original and two other surrogates.
2.1.3. Text Editing: Establishing the Ur-text and Textual Derivatives
The letters in the collection were written in a combination of Swiss-German dialects and what linguists call a compromise replica, which is an assimilated version of German which includes some traces of English. Translating letters required expert knowledge of the script in which they were written and the range of dialectal features. Under the guidance of Annie Reinhardt, several graduate students and a paleography expert Marcel Rotter have provided transliteration (transcription from various hands in which these letters were written) of each letter, and the English translation.
2.2. Frautschi Letters Virtual Archive
How these letters reflect the process of acculturation and linguistic assimilation is subject of scholarly analysis. The physical evidence that these letters contain (their format, folding practices, how their authors managed the writing surface, the quality of paper as well as conditions of transfer including postal information) were preserved in a number of ways: the process of editing the text, scanning practice which aimed to retain as much visual information as possible, and adding metadata to aid accessibility, document the process of conversion to electronic formats (scanning, etc.) and other forms of editing, and markup using SGML (TEI compliant).
2.2.1. Scanning
3. Frautschi Letters Virtual Archive: The Sources
The Frautschi Letters Virtual Archive includes primary and secondary sources. In the first group, the sources are divided in three groups. The core group of letters are the Frautschi Letters to which is added a Diary of Christian Frautschi (1905), and Extra Letters. Secondary sources include a family history written by Lowell Frautschi, from his reminiscences and based on primary sources accessible to him and the collaborative essay, The Wisconsin Mosaic, compiled by the students in LIS 839 class, Special Collections in the Digital Environment (Spring 2000).
3.1. Primary Sources: The Letters and a Diary
3.1.1. Frautschi Letters
These are letters written by several members of the Frautschi Family. They include letters written by Abraham, Christian, Jacob, Johann Peter Frautschi, F. Huebler and F. Reichenbach. Some of these were Swiss-American immigrants to Wisconsin, revealing their experiences of the new environment.
3.1.2. Diary of Christian Frautschi (1905 Trip to Europe)
The excerpt of one of several diaries (including business records of financial transactions) that are left in the Max Kade Institute collection. The particular interest of this item is the portion in which Christian Frautschi records his experiences from a trip to Europe he undertakes, over fifty years from the time that he left his native Turbach and exactly 53 years after the first letter in this collection that he wrote to Switzerland about his impressions and experiences as a new immigrant to Wisconsin.
3.1.3. Extra letters
Extra letters form a letter group that includes excerpts from letters, and letters that have survived as fragments, as translations (the original being lost), or by being transcribed in another letter. The survival patterns for historical collections depend on unpredictable forces. In this case, the survival of letters is fragmented, resulting in incomplete historical record, but revealing other forces at work which tell not so much about the letter itself but of the social network that is involved in its historical circulation and circulation of letter in private family archives.
3.2. Additional Sources
3.2.1. Lowell Frautschi, The Hundred Years of a Family Business
The text authored by a descendant of the writers of the original letters, Lowell Frautschi, used the letters in writing a speech titled The Hundred Years of a Family Business, which he delivered to the Madison Literary Club in April 14, 1969.
3.2.2. The Wisconsin Mosaic - Work of 6 Bricoleur Teams
Though I am not using [bricoleur] in its linguistic sense, it is not without relevance, for the units of the first articulation are already literary works that are then combined and organized into a literary work of a higher order. This type of commposition is different from one that fuses various outlines and sketches into a single definitive version; here, the completed work resembles a mosaic where each piece retains its own face and character. (Levi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read 1993, 7)
The Wisconsin Mosaic is a multimedia collaborative essay in which 23 students (in six groups) worked together to develop the content and the presentation. The Wisconsin Mosaic presents the context for the letters, in image, and word. This cut-and-paste method of composition is known as the technique of bricolage. Compiled from primary and secondary sources, this resource aims to document the life of 19th-century Wisconsin. 1848 to 1905 timeframe mirrors the time in which the letters were written (1852-1904), pushing the initial date to the year of Wisconsin statehood.
No effort was made to create a visual or intellectual template that the students had to fit into, in order to accommodate the creativity of each group but also to not impose on them any particular web-authoring tool (proprietary software). The essays were created on different platforms, using a variety of HTML-authoring software. This was necessary within the educational context in which such project was managed, in which many students were experts in web-authoring and managing texts in a networked environment, while others started with no knowledge of HTML. The focus of this course was not to train students in web-authoring (although training opportunities were provided for them, as well as two hours of help sessions each week) but to make them understand the issues in migrating historical collections on the web. Imposing a web-authoring software, likewise, would go against the grain of such a project, which socialized library science students into a new culture of text and knowledge management, which is platform independent, standards-compliant, and not tied to proprietary text editors. The fact that it socializes the students to collaborative and participative nature of networked textual environments also called for flexibility.
The submission method for the project was twofold. The students submitted the links to their sites, and a hard copy version of their work, to be mounted on a single site. The first, distributed model is unstable and without potential for archving text. Centralized location model with archival copies required further editing of the HTML source code. The technical assistant for the course, Sasha Gruenberger has compiled the material using HTML code which she cut-and-paste in a single framework, using Macromedia's Dreamweaver software supported by UW-Madison University System. She has also written online help during the course of the project.
The tagging guidelines are based on the official TEI documentation, mostly a description of the TEI Lite: TEI Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange (by Lou Burnard and C.M. Sperberg-McQueen). In cases where a need called for using the full TEI P3 documentation, Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3), edited by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard. This was occasioned to use for names of people, places, and organizations.
Created: 20 March 2000
Revised: 14 April 2000
Comments to: dalbello@scils.rutgers.edu