Notes from the DEPCHA Field and Beyond: TEI/XML/RDF for Accounting Records

Session Proposal—Short Papers

TEI 2022, Newcastle

Abstract:

The short papers in this session focus on questions that arise in the process of editing manuscript account books. Some of these questions result from the “messiness” of accounting practices in contrast to the “rationality” of accounting principles; others arise from efforts to reflect in the markup social and economic relationships beyond those imagined in Chapter 14 of the P5 TEI Guidelines, “Tables, Formulae, Graphics, and Notated Music.” The Bookkeeping Ontology developed by Christopher Pollin for the Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative for Historical Accounts (DEPCHA) in the Graz Asset Management System (GAMS) extends the potential of TEI/XML using RDF.

In “Operating Centre Mills,” Tomasek and Bullock focus on markup for information about the people, materials, and machines used to produce cotton batting at Centre Mills, a textile mill in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1847-48. The general ledger for this enterprise includes store accounts, production records, and tracking of materials used to run the mill. Entries that reflect the costs of mill operation show sources of raw cotton, daily use of materials, and payments for wages and board for a small labor force. Examples in the paper demonstrate flexible use of the <measure> element combined with a draft taxonomy based on Historical Statistics of the United States, a resource for economic history originally published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The goal of the edition is to develop additional semantic markup to supplement Pollin’s Bookkeeping Ontology.

“Wages and Hours,” Hermsen and Walker’s paper, emerges from their work on a digital scholarly edition of account books of William Townsend & Sons, Printers, Stationers, and Account Book Manufacturers, Sheffield UK (1830-1910). Volume 3, “Business Guide and Works Manual,” speaks both to book history and to cultural observations about unionization, gender roles, and credit/debit accounting. Parts of this complex manuscript might be considered a nineteenth-century commonplace book; it also contains specific instructions for book binding, including lists of required materials and a recipe for glue.

The financial accounts in this collection are recorded in ambiguous tabular form with in-text page references to nearly indecipherable price keys. For example, Townsend provides a “key” to determine the size of an account book. The formula is figured using imperial standards for the size of a sheet of paper (i.e. Foolscap) and quarto or octavo folds of the sheet and the number of sheets. This formula, along with the type of ruling and binding, provides the necessary numbers for the arithmetic that will determine the price of an account book.

Naoki’s paper, “Stakeholders in the British Ship-Breaking Industry,” develops a set of methods to analyse structured data of historical financial records, taking a disbursement ledger of Thomas W. Ward, the largest British shipbreaker in the twentieth century, as an example. That ledger is held by the Marine Technology Special Collection at Newcastle University, UK. The academic contribution of this research is to critically examine the possibilities and limitations of DEPCHA, the ongoing digital humanities approach for semantic datafication of historical financial records with the TEI and RDF, mainly developed by scholars in the United States and Austria, and to present an original argument in British maritime history, which is to visualise a part of the overall structure of the British shipbreaking industry.

Development of DEPCHA was supported by a joint initiative of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives and Records Administration in the United States and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Bios:

Kathryn Tomasek is Professor of History at Wheaton College. She has been working on TEI for account books since 2009, and she was PI for the DEPCHA planning award in 2018. She chaired the TEI Board between 2018 and 2021

Olivia Bullock is a senior Creative Writing major at Wheaton College who studies intersectional identities in literature and history.

Lisa Hermsen is Professor and Caroline Werner Gannett Endowed Chair in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Rebecca Walker, Digital Humanities Librarian, coordinates large-scale DH projects and supports classroom digital initiatives in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Naoki Kokaze is an Assistant Professor at Chiba University, where he leads the design and implementation of DH-related lectures in the government-funded humanities’ graduate education program conducted in collaboration with several Japanese universities. He is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Tokyo, writing his doctoral dissertation focusing on the social, economic, and diplomatic aspects of the disposal of obsolete British Royal Navy’s warships from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s.