Good morning an welcome to Global Perspectives.

I'm David Dumke.

Today we're joined by Doctor Rosalind Beiler who is a professor of history at UCF who does a lot with digital - digitizing old letters of of migrants coming to the United States.

I'm going to let you explain it because it's a fascinating project.

It's called PRINT.

Tell us a little about PRINT.

>>Okay.

So PRINT stands for People Religion Information Networks and Travel.

And it's about the dynamics of migration in the early modern world.

And actually to tell you about this project, I want to start with how I got there, because I, I'm a migration historian.

I work on the migration o people to the British colonies, actually, before we were the United States, and I was working on a project on a man named Kasper Wister who migrated to Pennsylvania in 1717 and became a Quaker.

And I had a collection of family letters for him, which is really unusual for people who are German speaking migrants in this time period.

And as I was going through his letters, there was one in particular.

By the time the letter he was writing this letter, it was the 1730s, and he was writing to a business partner in a little town close to Heidelberg.

And, he asked his business partner to, go to a man named Jakob Schnabel and Jakob Schnabel.

So in the early modern period, we identify people mostly through church records, because that's where vital statistics were kept.

So as I was trying to identify everyone in these letters, I could identify his business partner as an elder in the Reformed Church.

And so he wrote to his business partner and said, please go to Jako Schnabel, who I could identify as an elder in a Mennonite or an Anabaptist church.

And he said, ask him to find people who are migrating to Pennsylvania so that they can carry the rifle that I custom ordered from you as a part of their household belongings in their chests.

And so basically, he was asking, his business partner to have Jakob Schnabel find people to smuggle, these guns for him.

Right.

And he said, Ask Jakob Schnabel because he knows all the people who are migrating.

And so, the the project that I'm working on now sort of came out of questions from that story.

I wondered first of all, why was a Quaker, asking a Mennonite?

Those are both really pacifist groups-- >>For guns.

>>Right.

So what's the story there?

And then the other question for me was, why is it that it was the Mennonite elders who knew all the people who were migratin to Pennsylvania in this period?

And so the Gunrunning story I have to say, for another day.

But but that, anecdote really got me to thinking about who the people were in Whistler's letters.

And many of them were religious minorities.

They belonged to, of these dissentin religious groups in the period.

And what I bumped into and what I began to uncover were, correspondence networks.

He was using them for his business purposes, but they were all dissenters.

They were all these religious minorities.

And so that led me to, the research project that forms the foundation for PRINT.

So what I'm looking at in that research project is, these correspondence network that emerged in the 17th century and they emerge as people wh belong to these religious groups are being persecuted and begi to correspond with people across political, cultural, social economic borders, if you will.

And, so, for instance, in the 1630s and 40s, there were Dutch Anabaptists who began to correspond with, fellow believers in Switzerland who were being forced into exile, were being banished because of their religious beliefs.

And they began to correspond regularly to help them.

The first they were they were lobbying to try to gain religious toleration.

And then when that failed, they helped them to resettle in other areas of Europe.

In the 1650s, Quakers from Scotland and England, who themselves were being persecuted, began to correspond to one another.

And they also began to visit Anabaptist and pietistic, people in Europe who they thought might be ope to their version of the truth.

So they began to send missionaries out.

And as they did so, they began to correspond regularly.

And so they created these communication networks that, were overlapping and intersecting and really acted almost like a kaleidoscope.

Right?

They were overlapping and intersecting, and ultimately become channels for informatio about migration possibilities.

So what I began to find was that by the early 1700s, these networks were no longer about religion at all, but they took on a life of their own as people with different interests began to send information through them.

So people like William Penn, who was trying to promote his colony, used these same connection to send promotional literature to recruit colonists head of state like the English queen.

And and the Prussian king used the same networks to recruit people for areas that were devastated by war.

And then merchants began using them, like Wister for their own business purposes.

Right.

As well.

And the migrants themselves were seeking better opportunities.

So what I, what I was arguing and what I am arguing in that project is that ultimately these networks provide sort of the dynamic for shifting migration flows, to the British colonies.

But PRINT started because I was having a really hard time visualizing these networks.

They're not really stable networks.

And so, people were constantly moving.

The connections betwee people were constantly shifting.

And, you know, when one person dropped out, the whole constellation of connections changed.

So I couldn't visualize them on a two dimensional page which is what I set out to do.

So the project started to solve that visualization problem.

So what we're doing wit the project is we are creating a digital collection of letters of correspondence.

We have about 3,000 letters, of Quakers, Anabaptist and Pietists.

And we're creating a porta to these letters so that users will be able to com to the collection and query it.

And the returns will com as a series of visualizations.

So the visual.-->>Yeah, I'm trying to it's hard to kind of capture this obviously in an interview in interview form.

But what are some of the things they're going to both se and learn through these letters?

>>Right.

So through these letters.

So the thing that I love about these letters is that many of them are either from or t or about ordinary people, right.

So they're going to learn lots of things.

If you're interested in issues of religion, which they're all religious minorities, you can learn all about, why people are moving and what they believe the Quakers were that all of these groups, they're on the radical side in this time period.

They're not being tolerated and they're pretty in your face.

So you get to see, you know, what they're doing, in, in terms of their religious beliefs.

But what really fascinates me i the stories of ordinary people that show up.

Right?

So for instance, in the Quake letters, we have a set of Quaker letters from a family, the Pemberton's, who end up migrating to Pennsylvania and in those letters-- >>Massive projects on the Pemberton's, I believe.

>>Yes, yes.

So.

Well, we have a collection of, like, 460 letters, right from, from and to this family and their friends.

And so, for my purposes, you get to learn about the whole migration process because they're writing some of the letters write about the experience of being on board ship and leaving.

But they're also writing abou what it's like to settle in a, in a colony, in a new place that they come over with Penn in the 1680s.

And so it's a brand new place.

But then there's also this very human story that's a part of it.

Right?

So there's one letter where where a father is writing to his teenage daughter.

She's 17, Abigail, and her mother has just died.

And she's basically running the household and looking after all of her younger siblings.

And he writes to her and he basically is chiding her because she hasn't done the right thing with the cider that she's sent to have delivere in Philadelphia from their farm.

And, and yet at the end, he talks about how much he loves her and, what he's proud of.

Right?

So you get to see, like, all of these different human stories in these letters.

>>I mean, so much of our history is read through political or military leaders or sometimes our artists.

>>Yes.

>>Or literature, but not the common-- >>Yes.

>>People or the day to day life.

>>Yes.

>>What what made you interested in kind of uncovering that side of history?

>>Oh, well, the human stories, that's what's always fascinated me about history.

I mean, I'm interested I'm interested in culture.

I'm interested in how people adapt to new situations and new places and, I guess we always act within political contexts, but I've alway I for as long as I can remember.

That's just what I'm interested in, right?

I think that it's we as ordinary people, our daily decisions that ultimately create those big political events.

Right?

It's a bunch of small decisions by ordinary people.

>>So let me ask you, you're describing, you know, that they were quite radical in terms of the the religious beliefs, which, you know, religious and kind of political beliefs kind of blended.

And that's wha led to the migration for many, if not most of them to begin with.

But what are some of the things that surfaced in their letters of like, what were their concerns on a day to day basis?

>>Their concerns were much like ours.

Making sure that they could put food on the table.

Right.

Their concerns for about their families and, making sure that their families were okay, you know, the, the some of the documents we have, these are not necessarily letters, but as I was looking to try t identify people in the letters, the ways in which we can find ou about ordinary people is because in the case of the Anabaptists in Switzerland, they were being persecuted.

And the governmen in Zurich confiscate their farms and then tracked every single year how they spent the proceeds, the profits from those farms to care for the family member who were imprisoned, to care for or to feed the family members who were imprisoned, and then to care for all of th children and the grandchildren of the parents who were imprisoned.

And so you get to see these stories of, you know, family separation.

And I, you know, I think that people then, much like we today, we care about our lives and making sure that we have a secure place to be and makin sure that we can feed ourselves and our friendships and our families.

I think those that clearly sort of bubbles up in these letters.

>>Do they capture both?

I mean, obviously when you have people who are going from a place, usually they're seeking a better life.

>>Yes.

>>Obviously in almost all cases.

>>Yes.

>>That's true today as well as it was then.

But in seeing a better life, it also can be very disorienting.

>>Yes.

>>So what are some of the things that were disorienting among these people?

They they're coming from towns and villages in Europe.

Often they and they come to a place where not everyone speaks the same language.

Number one, very different scenery.

>>Yes.

So I think that, it's very disorienting.

Right.

And again, I'm going to use the Anabaptists as, as one example.

These are Swiss farmers.

They don't want to leave home, and they try for decades.

But whenever things get too hot and the authorities come after them, they sort of disappear across the borders and then they sort of filter back in.

And when they do leave, it' it's very disorienting for them.

In their case, we don't have that many letters from them.

It's a little bit different from the Quakers who come over here, but they end up resettlin some of them in the Netherlands, and they can't understand the language, and the Dutch can't understand them, and they wear different clothing.

And so it's not it's not easy.

Right.

And then oftentimes they settle in other places for a short period of time but they can't own property or, you know, one of their issues is they are they are pacifists then, and they don' want to serve in the military.

And so they gain sort of certain rights to liv on the states of landed nobles for a period of time, and they gain religious toleration, but they can't continue that.

And so when the next elector or prince comes into power and changes the rules, then they leave again.

So there is this sort of repeat migration of moving from one place to another.

And every time it's a new culture and it's a new place, and they're having to start over.

>>In the colonies themselves you had different, different coloinies were run in different ways, and they drew different religious factions.

>>Yes.

>>I understand I lived in in Maryland for a while and that that was that had a very different history.

>>It did.

>>And so do you see this through the letters then?

>>You see this to a certain extent.

What I will say is that, you know, I started out looking at colonial North America, but this project actually is more about Europe than it is about the American side.

So I wa I kept going back from Wister.

So Wister was the the project that I was working on that was really more on the American side.

And I kept going back.

And so many of the letter that we have are in the period where it's not the case for th Quakers, who often end up here, but for both the pieties and the Anabaptists, they're not necessarily coming here immediately.

They eventually get here.

But these letters are more abou their migration within Europe.

>>Within Europe.

>>Right.

And so but it does I mean they end up coming originally, most of the peopl I'm looking at to Pennsylvania, because William Penn is a Quake and offers certain incentives, among which are inexpensive land and religious toleration.

And, you know, that's very much targeted through these communication networks to people who are suffering because they don't have the option to own lan and they don't have the option to practice their religion.

You know, freely they can within limits, where they're at in the Palatinate.

>>So let' draw back to the PRINT project.

>>Yes.

>>And thank you for all that background and obviousl the very fascinating information about the people who who wrote these letters to begin with.

What are the conditions of these letters?

Is this I mean, it sounds like an elaborate hunt for these, and I imagine they're not in very good condition.

So part of this projec is very much preserving these.

So they're there forever.

But also you're making the come to life in a certain sense.

>>Yes, I think, to me, one of the most important aspects of this project is making them accessible.

So the letters are actually held in five repositories in four countries and they're in three languages.

So they are hel in the Netherlands, in Germany, in the US and in the UK, and they're in English, Dutch and German.

And so and all of them are held by institutional repositories today.

So they've been gathere by these religious institutions, and that's the reason we still have them, even though I'm really interested in all of the other stories they tell.

Right.

The letters themselve are in really varying degrees, you're right, of conditions of, preservation.

But the other thing that we have to do to make them accessible, that are all handwritten and so they're all manuscript letters that are handwritten.

If you look at an English letter from the 1700s or the 1600s, it looks nothing like th English we write today, right?

>>Right, right.

>>And the same is true for Dutch and German.

They have their own paleography their own style of handwriting from the time period.

They're also - nobody use standardized spelling.

So there are all kinds of challenges to making them accessible.

So what we're doing is we're working with those archivists at the repositories, to have them scanned.

And then we obtain the digital copies.

But in order to make them searchable and legible and accessible, every one of them has to be transcribed.

The Dutch and Germa will be translated into English.

And then we're also creating metadata.

And that is all the cataloging information that we need in order to make them searchable.

And we are, taking the names of all of the peopl and the places in the letters.

And we're creating linke open data and that's essentially networking the people in our database to people who show up in letters and other digital projects so that a researcher can come and know that Phineas Pemberton and a letter in our collectio is the same Phineas Pemberton, as one in the British Library, for instance, right.

So to d that, we've received a big grant from the National Archives, and we have an amazing team o students who are going through and creating all of the cataloging information for the letters, but they have to learn how to read them.

And so they learn how to read them and transcribe them and, turn that data all into something that's machine readable and searchable.

>>So PRINT is, you as you go forward, there's no real end date.

You're going to be doing this continually, you've found the project of your life.

>>I have-- >>Will continue forever.

>>Indeed.

>>How big is your team?

And then how do you you know, it sounds so complicated to put all this together.

So.

>>It is complicated to put it all together.

And I have to say, I would not have a project if it weren't for my fellow colleagues at the center for Humanities and Digital Research.

In fact, Amy Drew, Doctor Amy Drew is the reason the the project exists at all.

We met and I was talking about havin trouble visualizing my networks and she said, oh you should do a digital project.

And I was like, I can't do that.

So she has the sort of technical expertise.

And Brooke Miller, doctor Brooke Miller, they have the technical expertise and I have the content knowledge.

Right.

So we have a team at the moment.

They're about 20 students.

But it's varied.

We started out with, you know, a few people here, a few people there, and we keep adding to it.

But we have a team of students, who we're paying through this grant, who are our digital archive assistants, basically, who are helping to create the metadata.

And so within our team, we have subgroups, and we have a, a research tea for each collection of letters.

In some cases there are two there are multiple research teams for each repository where they are becoming really familiar with the people and the letters.

And and now we're moving into they're doing research in order to figure out exactly who is who.

But we also have to standardize all the names.

In some cases, people are writing.

I'm fascinated by languages.

So in some cases people are writing across languages.

The Dutch Mennonites, for instance, they would receive these letters from the Swiss Germans and they would translate them into Dutch.

And so names would be rendered in Dutch and in German and sometimes in English.

And you have to figure out who is who and how are we going to standardize?

Oh, lots of it.

And that's the fun part of it.

For me, it's detective work.

>>How much is this?

I mean, the actua process is fascinating itself, but I'm also, you know, I as someone who loves history, I'm fascinated by the the impact too.

Who is most interested in your work?

>>That's a really good question.

So when I think about impacts, I think about them in sort of three different levels, right.

One is other scholarly historians.

And there I think that my, my work will help to sort of show what came before the history that historians have written about German speaking immigrants to the British colonies in the 18th century, which was the first sort of mass migration.

This shows the, the, the dynamic networks that led t what others have written about.

So that's the sort of scholarly debate.

I think that this this projec will ultimately provide access to documents that will allow for many, many different kinds of scholarly debates because there are so many different aspects that show up in these letters.

Right?

It's not just about migration.

You could look at family relationships.

You could look at economics, you could ask many different questions about them.

So there's the scholarly, impact.

But I'm also really hoping that, when these letters are available, they will be of interest to, citizen scholars and to families who are working on there are people who are working on their family genealogies.

Right.

So one of the things that we're doing, in order to transcribe them, is that we're crowdsourcin the transcription of the letters so we don't have the capacity to transcribe 3,000 letters.

And we also don' have the capacity to translate German and Dutch letters here among our student body.

And so, we are putting the letters u on a platform called Zooniverse, which is a crowdsourcing platform.

And, citizen scholars, anybody from across the globe can com online and, transcribe letters.

And so, since February of 2023, we've had like 1,300 peopl come and transcribe our letters.

Has the quality been consistent or is that something you have to monitor?

>>We'll have to monitor that.

So the way that Zooniverse works is that you transcribe line by line and after lines have been transcribed three times, then they're retired and then we will export them.

And we have to go through and correct.

But we do that with our own.

You know, we started piloting these processes.

I started piloting them in th classroom and teaching students how to read and then our team started transcribing.

Right, letters.

And, and basically we've always had three different copies, three different sets of eyes, and then a fourth person looks at it and we do the best we can.

So, you know, even having read, these handwriting's since the 1990s, there' still times when it's like, oh, I missed that word about now means, you know, I can see it means something else because we learn more about the context.

And as you learn more about the context, then you can identify the content of the letters in different ways.

>>This may be a simplistic question, but I think it's it's it's I'm curious about it.

Is there more interest in the work from where people immigrated t than where they immigrated from, or is it or is there equal interest on both sides?

>>That's really interesting.

I don't thin I know the question to that yet.

So our our portal is not yet built and is not yet available to the public.

I will say that I have don workshops and presented in both in to European audiences and to American audiences, and there's a great deal of interest in both cases.

About the content itself.

But then it's also really interesting as a digital project.

And there are a lo of really interesting challenges that we're overcoming.

One of the challenges is that visualization.

So there were sort of three visualization problems.

>>Explain a little about the visuals.

>>Yes.

So the visualization problem that we're trying to solve one is that the networks aren't stable.

So, you know people are constantly shifting.

The networks the connections are constantly shifting.

And so I wanted to show how they change over time.

Right.

Which is hard to do in a static form.

But then the other is I wanted to show movement across space because I'm interested in migration.

Right.

So I really, and we have a mapping team is working on it even as we speak a computer science senior project, mapping team, they are finding ways to take the network visualizations that our computer science senior project networking team just finished.

And they're going to be able to show, visualize the networks on historic maps from the period, which is not an easy task because historic maps aren't you can't geo locate the information to them like you can today.

Right.

And then the third, the third thing that I wanted to do with the visualizations was to show more than just simply the religious connections.

So I wanted to be able to show users, allow them to choose what kinds of connections they wanted to see between people, and then to drill dow and see the original documents.

So all of those things are creating, challenges digitally, right?

In terms of the technology to be able to create, first of all, the the infrastructure of the database, but then the portal to that database, to have the networks visualized in a dynamic kind of way that shows change over time, movement across space, and allows you simultaneously to, you know, click on a point that represents the center of a letter and drill down to get a biography of that person, or click on a line that represents a lette between a sender and receiver, and drill down and see the letter itself, and its contents.

Yeah.

>>So we we're running out of time.

Unfortunately, I've really enjoyed the conversation.

So I got one more brief question and it could be answered in long form, but we only have time for a brief answer.

That is, you know, history i not just set, it's not static.

It's always changing.

And this this project obviously is making it alive.

Is tha is that an accurate description?

>>Absolutely, absolutely.

And I think that's why in some ways, it's hard for me to try to judge how it's going to impact people o which side of the ocean.

Right?

Because I think that by making these letters accessible, people are going to come with their own questions and they will be able to find new sets of answers.

And obviously, the kinds of questions and answers that they can as and receive are limited by the the dat that we have accessible.

Right.

And that data is collected by institutions.

So, you know, it's still is it's curated in a very particular kind of way.

But my hope is that peopl will bring their own questions.

And history is always ongoing.

And you know, we'll we'll learn all kinds of new things as a result.

>>Doctor Beiler this is a fascinating project and thank you for joining us today.

>>Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity, David.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.