The Answer to the Mystery

This week I finally got the chance to sit down and speak with Dr. Beiler so we could sort out the mystery of the letter that did not seem to match up with the associated transcription in The Documents of Brotherly Love.  After she looked through the two letters in Dutch and looked at the De Hoop Scheffer Database, she determined that I was correct in finding out the footnote was wrong. The letter that I was looking at was not the same one. However, they did relate to each other. The letter in Documents of Brotherly Love was actually in response to the letter I was looking at in the database. However, we were able to find the correct letter in Documents of Brotherly Love that it correlated with, so that was interesting.

I have definitely been paying more attention to the letters to make sure that the footnotes are correct whenever I see that the letter in my database is not the copy they transcribed, but is supposed to be another copy that should be near exact to it. I do look forward to the day all these copies get translated so that we can compare how similar or different they really are. Especially because most of these copies were created to send to other important figures to help them stay in the know. It would be interesting if it was discovered there were deliberate discrepancies between copies and translations. This week I also added Keywords to quite a few of the documents, but many of the documents I was working on had strange issues that ended up making them more time-consuming.  I am now understanding the difficulties of obtaining large amounts of data and organizing it in an easy-to-understand way.

Actually, when it comes to keywords, we have realized that as a whole group, they have not really been standardized. Which makes it difficult for new people to jump into the endnote process. A coworker decided to start the standardization process. I was interested to learn a little bit more about the technical and collaborative aspects of the project, so I volunteered to help. I started that this week and actually got through the initial setup faster than I thought I would, however, I knew the beginning was going to be the easy part, it is finding out how everybody else is doing things that the challenge will occur.