Zürcher Nachtzedel
7 Sept 2024 - Luzern
This weekend I attended my first hackathon in several years, GLAMhack24. It's run annually by Swiss OpenData in a different city with datasets provided by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (hence "GLAM"). These are mainly Swiss institutions, but this year there's also some from Mexico because of the Hapsburg connection. The family started near Zürich and after inspiring the creation of the Swiss Confederacy against them because of their cruelty, the Hapsburgs went on to rule the everything from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Netherlands, Spain, and much of the New World at their height. Mexico's short-lived Emperor Maximillian I was their last gasp at ruling part of the new world. They eventually lost even Austria-Hungary after WWI. But I've gone widely off topic...
The group that I joined was from Zentralbibliothek Zürich and has recently imaged "Nachtzedel" dating from the years 1780-1818. What are these? Well the city of Zürich thought it was important to record every person stying in the city's hotels every night. This Nachtzedel was originally recorded by hand but 1780 the Nachtscrieber, whose job it was to compile these records nightly, convinced the city to give him a typesetting machine to print it. Then he only needed to reset the people who changed before printing rather than writing everyone out again. So we have these:
They are riddled with misspellings and only record the names or titles of important people. Peasants, labors, pilgrims, etc. are only listed like "10. Landl." (10 peasants). While another guy worked on the optical character recognition (OCR) of the images, converting them to text with the help of Claude, I worked on parsing the list of names and linking it to Wikidata. Cleaning up the messy data with a tool like OpenRefine seems to be the modern way rather than the ad-hoc python script I started writing. But it's hard to shake my distaste for GUIs in data processing. You can see what we ended up with in the Github repo. Like most hackathons the information gleaned about tooling was quite applicable to my day job.
