First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD Digitised

This dataset is created within the context of the digitisation project ‘First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD Digitised’, that ran over a period of three years (2020-2023) and was funded by the Mondriaan Fund, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport, and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. The aim of the project was to preserve, digitize, and transcribe the 143.000+ documents in the NIOD’s war letters collection and to enhance access to these historical records in various ways.

Contents
The dataset ‘First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD Digitised’ contains machine-readable data in plain text and structured file formats. The data is aimed particularly at researchers interested in the (computational or quantitative) analysis of personal correspondence (‘egodocuments’) in bulk.

The dataset consists of four different folders:

1. Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model ‘NIOD_WarLet_1935-1950’.

2. Ground Truth War Letters Transcriptions. Contents: README (.txt), Ground Truth Transcriptions in ALTO-XML, 966 files (.xml).

3. War Letters (1935-1950) Transcriptions. Contents: README (.txt), Transcriptions per inventory number in plain text format, 1480 files, (.txt).

4. War Letters (1935-1950) Metadata. Contents: README (.txt), Metadata dataset (.csv).