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. By drawing on (historical) linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology and by fine-tuning our methodology. 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?
To do this we have developed a digital annotation platform that incorporates all of the above parameters in selected parts of digitized versions of the premodern merchant letters. At the end of the project we digitized 6,000 letters through HTR (Transkribus) and OCR, of which a little bit over 1,000 have been fully annotated. This yields 11,865 statements about the future or almost twelve statements per letter on average.
Because all project members use the same methodology and mode of annotation, their correspondence and results of analysis can be compared chronologically. For example, 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.
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 blog, our social media and several presentations for a wider audience (in archives and at museums and local historical societies). The PI also featured in national newspapers and on public national radio.
Our website presents all the results of our research, features blogs about histories of the future and our research, written for the general public, and provides the bibliography that we built on histories of the future during the project as an online Zotero bibliography.
