OCR for fun and profit

As part of rethinking what I might do with my Leiden paper, I picked up Alastair Thompson, Left Liberalism, the State, and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany.. I had looked at the book quickly when preparing my Tantzen paper but this time worked through it line by line. I found it amazing. I recognized that that it contained large amounts that I wanted to make notes on for future reference.

I decided that it would be worth my time to run OCR on the text. Using my i-Phone,, I scanned the introduction, the conclusion, and his chapter on Schleswig-Holstein. Working thought text this way is intense. After digitizing the text, I needed to got through and clean it up; hence a second careful reading. Lastly, I had to go through and input the footnotes, yet a third time in this process to think about arguments and sources. A lot of work that would not make sense if I were only to use the text for a few footnotes, but Thompson’s handling of local liberal politics in Schleswig-Holstein is masterful. As I continue to look into the Landvolkbewegung, this is the essential starting place for me.

Still energetic, I decided to do the same with Martin Schumacher, Land und Politic, with the added steps of running the digitized texts through Google Translate and then creating an accurate English text. Having used this procedure with several of the German texts that I used for the Tantzen paper, I found it intellectually rewarding. Comparing the mangled Google text to my close reading of the Geman text provided a deeper appreciation of Schumacher’s work.

New ideas?

Since my return from Leiden, I have been mulling over different rural projects. I have been doing bibliographic research on two topics that I left long ago: the Deutscher Bauernbund and the Landvolkbewegung. I’ve found that there hasn’t been a lot of work published since I last looked at these topics, which all pre-dated my GIS work. I was particularly interested to learn that the newspaper of the Bauernbund post-1918 is extant at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin and at the Nationalbibliothek in Dresden. Amazing! Since I had completed my Bauernbund research before the Wende, I am not surprised. It would be really interesting to examine the conflict over the reintroduction of German tariffs freedom in 1925 and then the disintegration of the organization in 1927. Both would fit into my continued interest in Theodor Tantzen.

Theodor Tantzen, ESSHA and Leiden

Moving backward in time from 1893 was an enormous challenge but VERY fruitful. It did mean reading extensively in Oldenburg history. This has been extremely worthwhile.

[On a side technical note, I discovered that I could use the camera function of my i-Phone to scan text into a GoogleDoc that I could then clean up. Reading through the document a third time, I could create already typed notes, which I then printed. Reading through 4 times really fastened the material in my mind!]

Rethinking my work on Theodor Tantzen and north German rural politics within the context of the Vormärz and the needs of the conference panel helped me the appreciate the social and economic locus of progressism in Oldenburg. Going forward, I will want to see how this worked out in the Prussian districts of Aurich and Stade.

The ESSHA conference as always was incredibly exciting. Our session commentator, Niels Grüne made a set of inclusive and useful coments that I will address on this site at Projects/Theodor Tantzen, along with PDFs of my original and revised abstracts, the complete paper, and the3 read version. Our panel organizer, Joanna Innis, was very interested in drawing connection between the Landvolkbewegung in Schleswig-Holstein and Oldenburg. Upon reflection it sees to e that I should be able draw some interesting comparisons. Let’s see if I’m given enough time!

Leiden was a most amazing place. I will not be attending the 2027 conference in Lyon, but look forward to their venue for 2029.