This R data package provides access to texts of Peace Books (PB), reference reports prepared by the Historical Section of the British Foreign Office between 1918 and 1919 for use by the British Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The reports were published in 1920 in English. The individual volumes contain reference information regrading geography, culture, population, and economy of almost all countries and territories in the world. The package enables text analysis of the individual volumes. The list of references were removed from the corpus together with appendices, tables, tables of content, and other paratext.

Installation

remotes::install_github("standap/peaceBooksR")

Run the data

After installing peaceBooksR, just run the name of the dataset. The data frame is ready to be used as is. The data are already in the tidy format.

Examples

# Number of lines in each volume  
peace_books_pages |> 
  count(volume_title, sort = TRUE)

# distribution of volumes by continent 
peace_books_volumes |> 
  count(continent)

# Distribution of languages of resources in the authorities datasets
peace_books_authorities |> 
  count(lang_label, sort = TRUE) |> 
  head()

Processing and organization of data

The introductory section, some 36 lines, that is at the beginning of each digitized volume were removed. This section contains administrative information about each volume, including its title, authors, and publisher, as well as URL to the source file, information regarding copyright and OCR procedures. Subsequently, running headers and footers, empty lines, page numbers, and other paratext elements were removed, as well. Word strings split by hyphens at the end of the lines were joined. Finally, m- and n-dashes, as well as quotation marks were removed. Most of these removals were executed by a sed script and regular expressions, but many typos and extraneous characters were removed manually during visual inspections of the texts.

The page-based organization of the volumes with line breaks after each line of text was preserved in the dataset peace_books_pages. Since some methods require the text as uninterrupted flow of text of each volume. The dataset peace_books_volumes contains 160 rows with the full text of each volume in one row.

Although the lists of references (authorities) were removed from the corpus, they were transformed into a separate dataset peace_books_authorities that is part of this data package, as well.

Provenance

The corpus was created from twenty five bound volumes in the Hathi Trust Digital Library. Volumes on the German Opinion in volume 24 are not included in the corpus.

Table: List of bound volumes and their titles that constitute the peaceBooks corpus

htid	title	volume
mdp.39015039471258	Austria-Hungary (I)	1
mdp.39015064326716	Austria-Hungary (II)	2
mdp.39015010785791	Balkan States (I)	3
mdp.39015064326732	Balkan States (II)	4
mdp.39015064326740	Benelux	5
wu.89004522017	France, Italy, Spain, etc.	6
mdp.39015011939983	Germany	7
mdp.39015064326864	Poland and Finland	8
iau.31858044687006	The Russian Empire	9
mdp.39015010785874	Mohammedanism: Turkey in Asia (I)	10
iau.31858044687022	Turkey In Asia (II)	11
iau.31858044687030	China, Japan, Siam	12
iau.31858044687048	Persian Gulf: French and Portuguese Possessions	13
iau.31858044687055	Dutch and British Possessions	14
iau.31858044687063	Partition of Africa: British Possessions (I)	15
iau.31858044687071	British Possessions (II): The Congo	16
iau.31858044687089	French African Possessions	17
iau.31858044687097	German African Possessions (Late)	18
iau.31858044687105	Portuguese Possessions	19
iau.31858044871808	Spanish And Italian Possessions: Independent States	20
iau.31858044687113	North, Central And South America: Atlantic Islands	21
iau.31858044687121	Pacific Islands	22
iau.31858044687139	International Affairs	23
iau.31858044687147	Congresses: German Opinion	24
iau.31858044687154	Indemnities, Plebiscites, etc. Indemnities In Previous Wars	25