The Laborious Cleaning: Acquiring and Transforming 19th-Century Epistolary Metadata

The paper documents the process of collecting, consolidating, and publishing epistolary metadata from Finnish cultural heritage organizations to create an archive for bottom-up analyses of 19th-century epistolary culture. We describe and discuss the data survey that was conducted to gather information about available letter collections across Finland, as well as the cleaning and harmonizing of over 350,000 letters from twelve different sources in various digital formats. We have also developed a data model that combines event-based and letter-based aspects of the metadata. Furthermore, the paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the initial phases of data-intensive research and the importance of discussing the labor of cleaning data. We believe that our experiences described in this paper can have wider significance for other digital humanities projects in Europe.