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The Material Culture of Wills Project

@materialwills.bsky.social

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The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790 is a Leverhulme Trust funded project using digital technology in tandem with a volunteer community to transcribe & analyse 25,000 wills.

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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📢In case you missed it📢Our latest blog post reflects on our recent workshops in Exeter & The National Archives
We had a great time talking about the project, Zooniverse, and all things related to historical wills
#EarlyModern #History
sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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📢NEW POST📢

From different versions of wills, to household items, to exploring the Zooniverse, our latest post reflects on activities and conversations at our recent workshops

#EarlyModern 📇

sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Things I learned more about: - accessing datasets in digital collections (complex rights issues) - pre-processing of data - need to interrogate the contours of data/contexualise - infrastructure (eg storage, security) - bespoke vs off the peg tools and platforms - collaborative ways of working

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Just read Ahnert, Griffin, Ridge and Tolfo's Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data:

It v helpfully outlines challenges of managing a multidisciplinary Digital Humanities project in UK mixed-rights data landscape. 📇

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Interesting piece on the material culture left behind after death, objects as an extension of self and 'the new beginnings of things'.

www.theguardian.com/society/arti...

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A big thank you to people who have already contacted us with #EarlyModern wills related references, especially expert volunteer Anne-Marie Harvatt who generously shared lots of items from her own research 🙏👏

If you have suggestions, do get in touch! 📇

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Liz Wood's avatar Liz Wood @worsted.bsky.social
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I've been out guest-blogging... Join me to follow the threads from a single will across the South Seas, over to the Baltic and then back down the docks with the Sisters of Wapping

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Just delighted the resources page is already proving useful!

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Anita Hoffmann's avatar Anita Hoffmann @17cmedicalwomen.bsky.social
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Oh Mrs Garway...you are a lady of surprises!

Leaving your business and estate to your two daughters in trust and outside the control of any exisisting or future husbands!

#earlymodern #17thC

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Finally, we've been collating reading & links to assist anyone using #EarlyModern wills in their own research.

We are keen to expand this list of resources, so if you have suggestions please do let us know (here or via our website contact page). 📇

sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Across the two days we got to meet some of our expert volunteers in person, made connections with #EarlyModern academics working on similar projects, and got vital advice and shared knowledge with genealogists, solicitors and teachers (among others).

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Participants at the workshop also got a preview of our Zooniverse website, that Harry is currently putting the finishing touches to.

A week later, participants had already completed 1308 #EarlyModern checking/transcription tasks! The feedback we got on how to improve our site has been vital.

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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We ran 2 workshops: at the National Archives and Uni of Exeter on #EarlyModern wills in historical research.

We interspersed short talks on the project research with hands-on activities examining copies of wills. e.g. we compared an original PROB 10 will with the PROB 11 registered copy.

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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First, some big news & a huge thank you to our Expert Volunteers, who have now transcribed 414 pages of #EarlyModern wills: that's 26,199 lines of text!

This is the 'ground truth' data that we are using to 'train' our Handwritten Text Recognition model. Details: sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

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It's been a busy few weeks for the Wills project team, so here's a thread summarising some of the things we've been up to ...

#EarlyModern 📇

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Celine Camps's avatar Celine Camps @celinecamps.bsky.social
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Got to see Willem Claesz Heda's "Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware" (1635) in real life for the first time, and I'm awestruck by his detailed and skilled depiction of polished silverware 🏆. #earlymodern #histsci 🗃️

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Thanks so much to all the participants at our first What's in a Will Workshop at The National Archives yesterday. We had numerous interesting conversations, plus we are delighted to report that our workshoppers transcribed 350 lines from our #EarlyModern wills during the day! 📇

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As we train our Handwritten Text Recognition model we are getting some chucklesome mis-transcriptions, such as the man who makes his will in the name of Father, Son and Moly Gooste...

📇 #EarlyModern

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Reading the inscription on Sir Robert Bernard's memorial (1601-1666, 1st baronet Huntingdon) and encountered this childless mother: he was very happy a Second time in the marriage of Elisabeth Digby, Relict of Robert Ld Digby, who was a good Mother though she had no Children

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Great to see our project Co-Investigator Laura featuring in this short video about the importance of History and Archaeology, and of 'listening to the dead'... #History #EarlyModern

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Lots of interesting archive finds for the team this week - we've been to look at some original seventeenth-century wills, held by our project partners The National Archives. We're looking forward to discussing some of these findings at our in-person workshops in a couple of weeks! #EarlyModern

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Lots of interesting archive finds for the team this week - we've been to look at some original seventeenth-century wills, held by our project partners The National Archives. We're looking forward to discussing some of these findings at our in-person workshops in a couple of weeks! #EarlyModern

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Jane Winters's avatar Jane Winters @jfwinters.bsky.social
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If you work in research, higher education or the cultural heritage sector, I would be very grateful if you could spare 10-15 mins to complete this survey of ‘Attitudes towards Generative AI in research, cultural heritage and education’ forms.office.com/e/MjvHAUBTAG. Thank you very much in advance!

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📢ICYMI📢Our new 'Will of the Month' blog post explores the will of John Tylney, a 'scrivener' of Bury St Edmunds.

He spent much of his working life drafting wills, and left some fitting bequests to those who helped him execute his own... #History #EarlyModern

sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Thanks! Transkribus talk about their 'Titan' model here help.transkribus.org/super-models, I think they do update what they offer over time. They also provide access to other models that might be more accurate depending on what your original text is - see links at the bottom.

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Just re-doing this with the correct handle!

Do you mean the accuracy of the Transkribus model? Project team (inc. Harry @bhamhistory.bsky.social) are training our own model which we will improve as we go, but we are also doing lots of auto & human correcting. Harry might be able to say more

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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So sorry Iain! Bluesky often seems to trick me in this fashion.

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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Hi,
Thanks for your Q. Do you mean the accuracy of the Transkribus model? The project team (including Harry Smith @threeswrite.bsky.social) are training our own model which we will be able to improve as we go, but we are also doing lots of auto and human correcting. Harry might be able to say more!

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Adam Chapman's avatar Adam Chapman @adamchapman.bsky.social
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'Citizen Humanities' is concept that - as General Editor of @vchlondon.bsky.social (which has been using these approaches in myriad different ways for 125 years), I'm pretty familiar with: the tools and accessibility of material changes but history as a collective/collaborative endeavour does not!

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The Material Culture of Wills Project's avatar The Material Culture of Wills Project @materialwills.bsky.social
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At the workshop we discussed exactly how Transkribus (the Handwritten Text Recognition platform we use on the project) works.

It's not exactly the same but there are parallels with Large Language Models (LLMs), good explainer for those here: www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

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Thank you to everyone who attended our Expert Volunteer workshop this afternoon - it was great to hear all about your transcription finds!

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James Baker's avatar James Baker @jwbaker.bsky.social
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😱 Join us at Soton DH on 13 June for "Preserving our Digital Pasts: Stories, Methods, Futures".
💳 Registration free (with £ available to support your travel) but booking required.
🔗 critcatdigipres.github.io/2024-06_digi...
🪙 Huge thanks to @ahrcpress for funding our work.
#digipres

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