Jysk Ordbog is edited from an extensive notes collection consisting of approximately three million handwritten paper notes collected since 1932. The collection consists of both primary sources like excerpts about and in dialect, oral evidence collected from informants or from the dialectologist’s introspection and secondary sources like dictionaries and glossaries with information on the Jutland dialect. The editors of Jysk Ordbog also include comprehensive questionnaire material (collected 1947-2014) as well as comprehensive recordings of the Jutland dialect (informants born around 1900); parts of these two data groups are also part of the notes collection, which must be said to differ quite a bit. 

Since 2000 Jysk Ordbog has been published online and the need for digitisation of the notes collection is extremely relevant to ensure public access as well as a backup copy of the notes collection. The digitisation project will thus ensure:

1. A complete backup of the notes collection
2. Public access to the notes collection alongside Jysk Ordbog
3. Searchability of the notes collection.

The role of Center for Humanities Computing

The pilot project took place in the fall of 2021 where an excerpt of 25,5 drawers (approximately 56.000 notes) of the Jysk Ordbog notes collection, comprising a total of 3,1 million notes, were scanned and processed. To this end CHC provided a professional high-speed scanner and developed a specialized software application for the project called Document-Scanner for adding meta-data to the scanned notes.

The software makes the process of annotating multiple documents at once easy and fast and makes large scale scanning and annotation projects possible (the scanning and annotation of the 56.000 notes took around 70 hours including documentation of process). The software (Document-Scanner) is also customizable using pluggable templates enabling it to be used for any scanning job that needs to annotate the documents being scanned.