Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Back2theFuture (Back to the Future: Future expectations and actions in late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400-c.1830)
Période du rapport: 2021-08-01 au 2023-01-31
Back to the Future: Future expectations and actions in late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400-c.1830 or Back2theFuture, seeks to challenge grand narratives on past futures. From the eighteenth century onwards, the future was considered to be open, uncertain and constructible – the way we tend to perceive the future today. In contrast, it has been argued that early modern Europeans believed that the future was beyond the control of man. These assertions are generally highly linear and focused on modernity, have a fuzzy chronology and thin empirical base, biased by learned text. Moreover, these hypotheses fail to do justice to the presence and interplay of various (multi)temporalities and do not link future expectations to the concrete actions of men and women in the past.
To underpin this pioneering research which wants to understand how people in the past thought about the future and how this affected their actions, researchers in the project rely on a highly innovative combination of close and distant reading methods of more than 15,000 letters written in (varieties of) Italian, German, French, Dutch and English by and to European merchants in the period 1400-1830. These practical documents enable us to reconstruct different types of future thinking of these merchants and to assess how these thoughts powered their actual behaviour. Back2theFuture has four objectives: 1) identify different types of future thinking and how they interact, 2) trace chronological evolutions in past future-thinking, 3) connect future expectations to actions in the past, 4) explain the causes of changes in future-thinking over time and its relation with actions.
Back2theFuture took off when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Some saw this crisis as an opportunity to change our societies towards a new world, whereas others want to return to the normality of the “before times”. These lines of thinking reveal how future imaginaries can be used politically and how they might influence decisions we take today and their effects in the future. Back2theFuture shows how people in the past dealt with their moments of crisis and how it affected their futures. While we might not be able to draw immediate lessons from history, what Back2theFuture does demonstrate is that future-thinking is a key part of the condition humaine and is a major factor in both our daily lives and the evolution of our societies.
To underpin this pioneering research which wants to understand how people in the past thought about the future and how this affected their actions, researchers in the project rely on a highly innovative combination of close and distant reading methods of more than 15,000 letters written in (varieties of) Italian, German, French, Dutch and English by and to European merchants in the period 1400-1830. These practical documents enable us to reconstruct different types of future thinking of these merchants and to assess how these thoughts powered their actual behaviour. Back2theFuture has four objectives: 1) identify different types of future thinking and how they interact, 2) trace chronological evolutions in past future-thinking, 3) connect future expectations to actions in the past, 4) explain the causes of changes in future-thinking over time and its relation with actions.
Back2theFuture took off when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Some saw this crisis as an opportunity to change our societies towards a new world, whereas others want to return to the normality of the “before times”. These lines of thinking reveal how future imaginaries can be used politically and how they might influence decisions we take today and their effects in the future. Back2theFuture shows how people in the past dealt with their moments of crisis and how it affected their futures. While we might not be able to draw immediate lessons from history, what Back2theFuture does demonstrate is that future-thinking is a key part of the condition humaine and is a major factor in both our daily lives and the evolution of our societies.
Back2theFuture (B2TF) has been brought up to speed in this first period. We have taken significant steps forward in the following ways: 1) parts of the preserved collections of letters were selected, 2) these selections were digitized and then transformed into digital text using either state-of-the-art OCR (for printed editions of the letters) or HTR using Transkribus (for unedited handwritten letters preserved in archives), 3) we developed an online annotation platform, by drawing on (historical) linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology and by fine-tuning our methodology. At this moment 4000 letters have been digitized and almost 600 of them have been fully annotated.
The project set out to develop a typology based on the content of statements about the future, their temporal horizons and the way in which both of these were discursively expressed. This has lead us to a much finer conceptualization of past futures. When we annotate a future statement the following fields are included in the annotation of the specific part of the text: timing and specificity of the timing, a description/translation of the event, the location where the event will take place, the domain of the future narrative (general ones are politics, trade, correspondence, family, religion; they can be more specific and multiple combinations of different domains can be selected too), epistemic (encompassing knowledge, belief or credence in a proposition) and deontic (how the world ought to be according to certain norms, expectations or speaker desires) future statements. We account for typical correspondence conventions and instructions which are always future-oriented. In the case of epistemic future statements we include a field for the confidence of the writer and/or that of a third party. In the case of deontic statements, the event can be desirable or undesirable, have a source of (un)desirability (the “wisher”) and/or a beneficiary/victim of the (un)desirability. Finally, we determine who is in control of the event: is it one of the correspondents, God or a another entity?
At this moment we focus on the close reading analysis since this yields much richer results that can in turn inform later distant reading. For example, we can link particular words to particular domains or types of future statements and look for these in letters that will not be close-read. A first fascinating insight based on close-reading was the finding that future events in one correspondence (Dutch, 16th century, Cunertorf-Snel-Janssen) ranged between four hours and three years, on average they were 4.22 months in the future. Seasons played an important role in the mental time frame of the correspondents.
Because all project members use the same methodology and mode of annotation, their correspondence and results of analysis can be compared chronologically. Whereas the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century correspondence of Francesco di Marco Datini abounds with references to God, such references are much rarer in eighteenth-century French correspondences, where they are used specifically in sentences where the authors do not feel in control, such in times of war. After everyone has completed their annotations we will be able to evaluate the role of secularisation in the long run.
Another matter that came out of our current analyses and first results is the role of power. The future statement gets more authority when it is written or pronounced by a person of power. We can see different future discourses based on the position of their authors in the power hierarchy.
The Back2theFuture has also invested in communicating the theme of this research, its methods and its first results to a wider audience. We did so through our website, our social media and several presentations for a wider audience (in archives and at museums). The PI also featured in national newspapers and on public national radio. A series of blogposts to be posted on the website is currently being developed.
The project set out to develop a typology based on the content of statements about the future, their temporal horizons and the way in which both of these were discursively expressed. This has lead us to a much finer conceptualization of past futures. When we annotate a future statement the following fields are included in the annotation of the specific part of the text: timing and specificity of the timing, a description/translation of the event, the location where the event will take place, the domain of the future narrative (general ones are politics, trade, correspondence, family, religion; they can be more specific and multiple combinations of different domains can be selected too), epistemic (encompassing knowledge, belief or credence in a proposition) and deontic (how the world ought to be according to certain norms, expectations or speaker desires) future statements. We account for typical correspondence conventions and instructions which are always future-oriented. In the case of epistemic future statements we include a field for the confidence of the writer and/or that of a third party. In the case of deontic statements, the event can be desirable or undesirable, have a source of (un)desirability (the “wisher”) and/or a beneficiary/victim of the (un)desirability. Finally, we determine who is in control of the event: is it one of the correspondents, God or a another entity?
At this moment we focus on the close reading analysis since this yields much richer results that can in turn inform later distant reading. For example, we can link particular words to particular domains or types of future statements and look for these in letters that will not be close-read. A first fascinating insight based on close-reading was the finding that future events in one correspondence (Dutch, 16th century, Cunertorf-Snel-Janssen) ranged between four hours and three years, on average they were 4.22 months in the future. Seasons played an important role in the mental time frame of the correspondents.
Because all project members use the same methodology and mode of annotation, their correspondence and results of analysis can be compared chronologically. Whereas the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century correspondence of Francesco di Marco Datini abounds with references to God, such references are much rarer in eighteenth-century French correspondences, where they are used specifically in sentences where the authors do not feel in control, such in times of war. After everyone has completed their annotations we will be able to evaluate the role of secularisation in the long run.
Another matter that came out of our current analyses and first results is the role of power. The future statement gets more authority when it is written or pronounced by a person of power. We can see different future discourses based on the position of their authors in the power hierarchy.
The Back2theFuture has also invested in communicating the theme of this research, its methods and its first results to a wider audience. We did so through our website, our social media and several presentations for a wider audience (in archives and at museums). The PI also featured in national newspapers and on public national radio. A series of blogposts to be posted on the website is currently being developed.
Maybe as a result of the unexpected shocks of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine and the resultant optimism or pessimism today about our future, there is now an increase in historical research on past futures. Yet, this research is either concerned with theories of history, focused on elites and/or canonical texts or deals with limited cases – chronologically, geographically, socially. The main aim of Back2theFuture is to provide a sound empirical basis for socially varied (not the elite and/or intellectuals) histories of future-thinking encompassing different European regions and stretching over a period of several centuries. Only by building on such sounder base will we be able to confirm or reject grand narratives of change in future thinking on the one hand and investigate the relationship between thinking about the future in the past and the actions that followed such thinking on the other hand.
A second step forward offered by Back2theFuture is to harvest the potential of digital annotation which will lead to new practices for history as a discipline. Digitally annotating during close reading brings both the study of the histories of the future and history as a discipline a serious step further: through its systemacity, patterns can be observed in time and space and we can zoom in on particular episodes or words or consider the larger picture instantly. We can easily switch from close to distant reading based on the annotations we have produced. Historians quote from their sources and, to some extent, measure the frequency of certain words, yet our approach, through the systematic annotation platform, shows that comparison and an evaluation of change over time is possible and can be investigated on a firm footing without cherry-picking. In this way, the annotation platform and its structure can be extended to other types of letters and even other source types to investigate future thinking and other topics by extension.
Moreover, annotation by historians in the phase of close reading informs distant reading in later phases. Now, historians search through large source corpora for keywords they found in the secondary literature or are the result of surprise finding in one source. By systematic, yet time-consuming annotation of a sizeable part of the source corpus, the historian gets a much more fine-grained understanding of the texts and important linguistic markers that are a far better starting point for distant reading methods, whether they are simple keyword searches of more advanced methods such as topic modelling or word embedding approaches, which historians have started to explore. In the second phase of the research we will be able to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in several publications and through blogposts on our website, after the time-intensive annotation work executed in the first period.
A second step forward offered by Back2theFuture is to harvest the potential of digital annotation which will lead to new practices for history as a discipline. Digitally annotating during close reading brings both the study of the histories of the future and history as a discipline a serious step further: through its systemacity, patterns can be observed in time and space and we can zoom in on particular episodes or words or consider the larger picture instantly. We can easily switch from close to distant reading based on the annotations we have produced. Historians quote from their sources and, to some extent, measure the frequency of certain words, yet our approach, through the systematic annotation platform, shows that comparison and an evaluation of change over time is possible and can be investigated on a firm footing without cherry-picking. In this way, the annotation platform and its structure can be extended to other types of letters and even other source types to investigate future thinking and other topics by extension.
Moreover, annotation by historians in the phase of close reading informs distant reading in later phases. Now, historians search through large source corpora for keywords they found in the secondary literature or are the result of surprise finding in one source. By systematic, yet time-consuming annotation of a sizeable part of the source corpus, the historian gets a much more fine-grained understanding of the texts and important linguistic markers that are a far better starting point for distant reading methods, whether they are simple keyword searches of more advanced methods such as topic modelling or word embedding approaches, which historians have started to explore. In the second phase of the research we will be able to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in several publications and through blogposts on our website, after the time-intensive annotation work executed in the first period.