Projects in the field of digital humanities tend to vary in their methodology, scope, and execution. Although there are many interesting projects, the Vincent van Gogh Letters intrigued me the most. Led by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING with main editors Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Baker, this project’s goal was to digitize the surviving letters written by or for Vincent van Gogh. They decided to translate, edit, and annotate each letter for the centennial of the artist’s death and create a website to display all their work. This extensive venture took fifteen years to complete and was intended for Van Gogh specialists, art historians, literary scholars, and anyone with an academic background. The project argues that Vincent van Gogh’s letters are worth preserving and deserve an honored spot in art historical scholarship.
The project’s sources were the artist’s original letters. The letters were first compiled by the Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent’s sister-in-law, who published the first Dutch compilation in 1914, which were then expanded and translated into English in 1954. This edition was translated into several languages, including English and led to an increased interest in Vincent’s work. However, the English translation was full of inaccuracies, so rather than using the previous compilations from 1914 and 1954, the Van Gogh Museum decided to manually transcribe the original letters and use the 1954 edition to fill in the blanks. Many of the letters were owned by the museum itself or available in public archives, but some letters in the hands of private owners had to be borrowed for the project. Once the sources were assembled, the processing stage of the project was ready to commence.
A team of interns and researchers spent the first five years of the project transcribing the original documents and reviewing secondary literature of the prolific artist. An XML file was created for each of the letters; the letters were tagged using the TEI guidelines in order to make the documents easier to organize and search. The next five years was spent translating the letters into English in order to provide an accurate translation for an international audience. They also gathered material for the annotations that would accompany each letter. The last phase, which took place from 2000 to 2005 involved editing the translations, writing introductory chapters, assembling the annotations, and formatting the material online.
Researchers created vangoghletters.org to present their fifteen years of hard work. The letters are arranged by correspondent, by period, and by place. To view a letter, one must simply click on one of the links. A two-column display enables the user to compare two of the following categories at the same time: the original text, the translated text, a facsimile of the original letter, any research that was done for this letter or the time period, and a list of associated artworks. The website was created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They used the Ruby programming language to draft most of their site. They also used the Lucene search engine program for the search index and ImageMagick software to create the feature that enables users to zoom in on the facsimile of the original letter. The final product is easy to navigate and useful for students researching Vincent van Gogh.
Although there were no distinct conclusions from the project, it successfully provided research material for the art history community. The scholarly primitives of annotation and comparison were used most heavily as seen with the notes on each letter and the side-by-side analysis tool. Even though the project’s outdated webpage from 2005 can be considered a weakness, the simplicity of the site makes it extremely user-friendly and helpful for an audience that wants to access information easily. The Vincent van Gogh Letters project is a beneficial technological tool that helps to further humanities-based research.
