The Library closures due to the lockdowns have led to some of the onsite volunteers becoming virtual volunteers and staying engaged from home by correcting the text of digitized Victorian Newspapers on Trove.

Trove is a database which holds thousands of digitized historical newspapers, i.e., those mostly published before 1955, including over 350 Victorian newspapers. The volunteers’ task is to correct the newspaper text which is not picked up in a keyword search. There are many reasons for this- the print may be faded, blurred, or in the gutter of the page, as seen below. The volunteers’ work ensures more accurate search results whilst making more of Victoria’s early history discoverable online.

In the above example, the volunteers have been ensuring the OCR’d text on the left matches the text printed in the newspaper on the right. Where the words do not match, the volunteers edit them in Trove. Once this is done, the words in the article will now be found in a keyword search.

The project requires volunteers to read each sentence carefully, which can be challenging as some articles can be particularly verbose. Norman, one of the volunteers, has kept a list of some archaic words he has come across. ‘The contemporary reader can easily digest these early Melbourne papers but some of the vocabulary and vernacular of the day will have them reaching for the dictionary and giving a wry smile’, says Norman. ‘They will also quickly realise that having a good grounding in Latin would be handy.’

Some of the words (and definitions) that Norman has come across are listed below:

arrogate             to claim unwarrantably or presumptuously;
batties                mad
badinage            light, playful banter
coxcombry         conceited arrogance or foppishness
currier                a person who dresses and colours leather after it is tanned
disembogue        to discharge contents by pouring forth
gibbeted             execute by hanging/ridicule someone
pellucid              allowing the maximum passage of light,
philippic             a bitter attack or denunciation, especially a verbal one.
replevied            to recover possession of
surtouts              a man’s close-fitting overcoat, a frock coat
thraldom             bondage; slavery; servitude.
vaticination        prediction

Historical newspapers also remind us that some things have changed. For example, names starting with ‘Mc’ were often written in newspapers as M’; there wasn’t always a birth and death notices section- personal notices could appear anywhere in the paper and some place names could be spelt differently or have a different name entirely. Knowing about these variances can improve your search results. Below is a list of some different place names the volunteers came across in their correcting:

Williamstown = William’s Town or Williams Town or William Town
Collingwood and Fitzroy = New Town or Newtown 
Maribyrnong River = Salt Water River / Saltwater River
Gippsland = Gipps Land
Sandhurst = Bendigo
Ballaarat = Ballarat
Baroobul Hills = Barrabool Hills (near Geelong)

Some olde measurements:
tierces = volume unit of measure of goods
lettle = little
rood = one quarter of an acre
hogshead = a large cask

Bottomry (underlined in the below example) refers to a maritime contract where the owner of a ship borrows money for equipping or repairing the vessel and pledges the ship as security.

Quidam Latin
otium cum dignitate – leisure with dignity
ad valorem– in proportion to the value
corruptio optimi fit pessima– the corruption of the best is the worst
forma pauperis– poor form/ in the character or manner of a pauper

To date the volunteers have corrected over 350,000 lines of text. A big thank you to all their work on this project- and especially to Liz and Norman who provided much of the content for this blog.