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 regarding 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 was removed from the corpus together with appendices, tables, tables of content, and other paratext.

The package contains five datasets covering full text, bibliographic references, sentiment tokens, and administrative metadata.

dataset title	purpose	lines	columns
peace_books_pages	Contains full-text. The page structure of the individual published volumes remains preserved.	370112	6
peace_books_volumes	Contains full-text. The texts are available as continuous text. The structure was dissolved, headings, section titles were removed.	160	5
peace_books_authorities	Contains bibliographic data of works used for compilation of the Peace books.	4830	10
peace_books_ner_sentiment	Table that only contains tokens that were assigned a sentiment value (positive / negative) by the Bing sentiment dictionary.	107013	7
peace_books_ids	Administrative metadata for each volume that allows for cross-reference between different versions of the corpus.	168	8

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()

# Number of tokens with positive/negative sentiment 
peace_books_ner_sentiment |> 
   count(sentiment)

# Number of volumes in the first bound volumes of the `Peace books`.

peace_books_ids |> 
  count(htid, title_vol) |> 
  head(5)

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. Some methods require the text as an uninterrupted flow; 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.

The German Opinion section of volume 24 is not included in the corpus. The volume's metadata is included in the table below for completeness.

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, Indemnities In Previous Wars	25

How to cite this work

To cite this package, use the citation information provided in CITATION.cff or click "Cite this repository" in the sidebar.