There are some Transkribus projects that aren’t only important for history, but for society too. “Trug und Schein” is one of those projects. For over 10 years now, volunteers have been transcribing the 2,600 letters of wartime lovers Roland and Hilde Nordhoff, and making this valuable historical source accessible to the public. But more than that, they have created an environment where such sources can be discussed, contextualised, and shared by senior citizens, young students, and everyone in between.
We spoke to Laura Fahnenbruck, former co-project leader of “Trug und Schein”, to find out more about creating a citizen science project with Transkribus.
How it all started
At the heart of the “Trug und Schein” project are two wartime lovers: Roland and Hilde Nordhoff (names are pseudonyms to protect their real identity). She was a factory worker, he was a teacher and led the church choir where the pair first met in 1938. Shortly after getting married in 1940, Roland was called up to fight in the war that had engulfed Europe. “As is so often the case, the couple was separated by the war,” Laura explained. “One was transferred to the front in Eastern Europe; one remained in rural Saxony. Like so many others, they communicated by letter, almost daily.”
The choir where Roland and Hilde met. © Trug und Schein
But the fact that so many of the Nordhoffs’ letters have been preserved is not usual. In total, the team received around 2,600 letters from the Nordhoff’s heirs, some of which are up to 20 pages long. With a collection of this size, the potential for gaining new insights into everyday life in Germany under National Socialism is huge.
“We agreed that this source was something very special. We didn’t want to let [it] continue to gather dust in the attic, but we also didn’t want to lock it away in an archive where only a few people would find their way to it. Therefore, we decided to make it accessible by digitising it and publishing it online as a blog.”
A heart drawn by Roland Nordhoff in one of his many letters. © Trug und Schein
Making history accessible for everyone
Right from the start, “Trug und Schein” was intended to be a participatory public history project. “Public history is linked to the approach that history is a matter for everyone and not just professional historians,” Laura explained about her team’s mentality. “This is how the idea of publishing, contextualising, and discussing these letters as a citizen science project came about.”
Citizen science is a method that involves volunteers in some aspect of the research process. In this case, the volunteers were tasked with transcribing the large corpus of handwritten letters. “As the manuscripts in the correspondence can no longer be read by everyone today, it was obvious to seek the expertise of people who can still read these writings,” said Laura. Those people turned out to be a mix of senior citizens who could still read the Sütterlin, Kurrent, and modern cursive scripts used in the letters, as well as younger students who were adept with technology, studying German as a foreign language, or both.
But the volunteers were more than just transcribers. “For us, it was always about co-creation. All participants were equally empowered to help determine the course of the project. We wanted to be democratically involved in the negotiation process about the past and have the knowledge of the crowd and the path to this knowledge as our goal.”
A screenshot of one of the 2,600 letters being transcribed with Transkribus. © Laura Fahnenbruck
Transcribing with Transkribus
At the beginning of the project, all the letters were transcribed manually. But over time, it became clear that transcribing the whole collection could become a never-ending project. “We needed to make our work easier,” Laura said. “That’s when Transkribus came into play.”
Even though many of the older volunteers hadn’t grown up with computers, they were open to trying this new software to see if it would make their work quicker. The first training course the team organised was offline. Over the course of a week, the volunteers familiarised themselves with the software and the new workflow. From then on, the seniors, together with the principal investigators and student volunteers, were quickly only working online. This allowed the project to evolve into a truly international initiative, with volunteers joining not just from Germany, but also from Austria, the Netherlands, and the USA.
“For some of our participants […] it can be a disaster if the mouse hangs, the browser view changes, or a pop-up window can't be clicked away. It was always important for me to take away the fear that something could break.” To achieve this, Laura and her colleagues wrote a manual, explaining how to use Transkribus and what to do if something unexpected happens. Thankfully, it is rare that anything is actually “broken” by a volunteer: “With Transkribus, there’s nothing that can’t be restored,” Laura said.
The three models created by the project. © Transkribus
Creating models for everyone to share
“It was a good thing that we had already transcribed 1,000 letters before Transkribus because they provided the basis for our first own text recognition model.” Back in 2018, the Transkribus team created two models for the project, one for each writer. “Basically, the first models were good enough. It was only when I realised in the course of another Transkribus project that there were not yet that many public models for the 20th century and for modern German handwriting, that I realised our data set is also very useful for others.”
Laura then set about training three new models: one for Roland’s handwriting with a mix of Kurrent, Sütterlin, and cursive; one for Hilde’s modern cursive handwriting; and one trained with the training data from both writers. All three models were highly successful: “Because we always transcribe so accurately and the handwriting is quite consistent, we have achieved really low CERs.”
The search console of Alltag im Krieg. © Alltag im Krieg
Joining forces with similar projects
“Trug und Schein” is well on its way to being completed. About half of the letters have already been published, another quarter have been transcribed, and the last quarter is waiting to be processed. It has resulted in not just a database of transcribed letters but also a theatrical play, a string of academic projects, and even a regular audio programme on Radio Tonkuhle.
After a while, however, the project website began to face technical problems. Laura and her colleagues, therefore, decided to join forces with the Culture and History Office, an archive in Bergedorf near Hamburg, who were also working on digitising letters from the period. “Collaborating with a non-profit historical institute has enabled us to secure the long-term digital archiving of our letters.”
Merging these projects required the assistance of yet more volunteers; for example, software engineers who wrote Python programs to transform multiple data sources into XML formats suitable for uploading to the new site. It was always very important in the transcription process to digitise not only the textual information of the letters, but also the visual information that the writers gave, such as the use of a smaller or larger font. This could now also be exported from Transkribus.
Together, the expanded research team of scholars and citizens has created a new searchable digital archive: “Alltag im Krieg”, or “Everyday Life in the War”. This new website allows users to search through Roland and Hilde’s letters as well as the correspondence of two other German couples during the war. Both scholars and the general public can take advantage of this rich collection of sources and discover more about life in wartime Germany from the people who were there.
Roland and Hilde’s story has brought the generations closer together. © Trug und Schein
A project for social good
Laura and her colleagues set out to digitise a collection of letters and make them accessible to everyone. That aim has definitely been achieved. But in addition, the project has also brought awareness of the social impact that such public history initiatives can have. “Senior citizens can use their skills for the good of society; students can get to know the older generation; people learning German can come into contact with native speakers; and so on.”
“The senior citizens were able to share their experiences – for example, about what their own parents had (not) told them about this time – and the students were able to ask questions that they could no longer ask at home. I repeatedly heard from the team that this engagement was one of the most important achievements of the project,” Laura explained.
“In the end, you get more than just a digitised historical source.”
Thank you, Laura, for sharing your project with us!