Time Out

At the end of November, I had entered all of the material that I had collected on crop production in Oldenburg 1890-1933 as part of my project on Theodor Tantzen, the German Democratic Party, and the collapse of Weimar liberalism. This was incredibly exhausting and time-consuming. I decided that I needed a break before continuing with my livestock data, so I took the month of December off. The many tasks of Christmas month would have made continued work extremely difficult in any case.

I also had to think about the way forward. I have read and made notes on all of the available narrative sources (both primary and secondary). After my data entry is compete, the next logical steps are to 1) marry my agricultural data to my GIS and begin spatial analysis, and 2) take all of these elements and begin fashioning my narrative.

Problem 1: there are sources at the Lower Saxon State archives in Oldenburg, the Oldenburg Landesbibliothek and the Institut für Zeitungsforschung in Dortmund (using the Schlweswig-Holstein press). I can craft my analysis provisionally without recourse to these materials but I really need to see them before calling the project „done“. This trip would not have necessarily have posed a physical problem (I travelled hin und her to Leiden last year with no problem) but the past several years have not been good for persons dependent on Deutsche Bahn and I fear travel disruptions would cut into my archival time.

Problem 2: On a personal level, I am uncertain about leaving central Ohio for 7-10 days in the coming year. My wide and I have committed to watching our eldest granddaughter every Sunday and our infant granddaughter 2 1/2 days/week. There is simply no way in good conscience that I can leave Charlene alone with this task.

I guess we‘ll see how this all works out. Tomorrow, it back to counting cows!

Return to dataset

I have read or re-read everything that I could find on rural liberalism and Weimar food policy. I have hit a stop until I return the archives.

Fortunately, I have collected reams of a agricultural statistics published by the Grand Duchy (then Free State) of Oldenburg. I am entering them now. Gosh, I’d forgotten how damnably boring data entry could be. I hope/assume that when I am done it will shed light on the policy debates and electoral movements of the Weimar period.

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.