3.3 Notation
1.2.1 Given Entities
Thegiven entitiesrepresent those entities referenced by the user in the question and associated contextual information in order to further describe and qualify the interest of the question (wanted entity).
As previously mentioned, this study does not primarily seek to quantify how many entities of the same kind are referenced but rather how many different kinds of entities are provided in inquiries. For this reason, the analysis only counted one distinct type of a given entity per inquiry. This means, for example, that even if more than one particular place is mentioned in an inquiry, only one particular place is counted by the analysis for this specific question.
The given entities are grouped into seven main categories which grew iteratively from the analysis and compriseActors(persons and groups),Documents,Times(periods and time-spans), Places,Events(unintentional events and activities),Things, andOther Entities(identifiers and general contexts). In each case, the analysis fundamentally distinguishes between particular entities and types or kinds of entities. This differentiation allows for an assessment as to the specificity of knowledge transposed in inquiries and, at the same time, paves the way for the further ontological modelling.
Table 1– Given Entities
Actor Description
particular person A particular person57is typically referenced by a proper name but often also indirectly by a phrase. Examples are "Walther Funk", "Göring", "[the Minister of the Interior] Frick", or "my father".
57Corresponds to "name of person / corporate / entity" in Duffand Johnson (2001).
type of person A type of person58refers to the occupation or profession, the social status, role or function, or also state of membership in a group. Examples are "[he is a] doctor", "ambassador", "photographer", "owner [of a printing office]",
"philatelic official", or "member [of the KPD]".
particular group A particular group is a gathering of more than one person able to collect-ively act or form a will or decision and official or administrative offices which commonly have only one representative at any given point in time.
Examples are "the government of the German Reich", "the Reichstag", "the Federal President", "the leadership of the SED", "the SED", "the Göring family", or "the fraction of The Greens".
type of group A type of group is, for example, "foreign citizens", "official authorities",
"companies", "revolutionary movements", "German leftist intellectuals",
"German authorities", or "communist parties".
Document Description
particular document A particular document loosely corresponds to "form" in Duffand Johnson (2001) and can be characterized by their form such as "the photograph [of your grand-mother]", "the map [of Berlin]", or "the file 20/03 on film roll", or by their function such as "the cadre files [of your grand-father]", "the participants lists [of the conference]", or "the report [of the trip to France]."
Documents also include collections of various kinds such "the party archive [of the SED]", "the personal estate [of a particular actor]", or "the journal
’[name]’".
type of document A type of document then includes kinds of documents according to their nature such as "photographs", or "drawings" in general, or to their function
"documents with personal assessments", "personal remnants", "collectors’
magazines", "petitions (of the populace of the GDR)", or "delegates lists (of the party conferences of the KPD)". Examples of types of collections would be "files (of the KPD)", or "the Norwegian police archives".
Time Description
particular period Aparticular periodis, for example, "National Socialism", "the Weimar Re-public", "the Eighties", "the early years of the GDR", "early Eighties", or
"Industrialization".
type of period Atype of periodis, for example, "ruling system", "artistic style period", or
"political period". These kinds of entities donot appearin the sample.
58Corresponds to "occupation or profession" in Duffand Johnson (2001).
time-span Atime-spancannot be distinguished into types and particulars. Time-spans often characterize activities or events such as births or deaths. Examples are "1975-1985", "22. Nov. 1891", "September 1986", "1989", "before August 1944", "night of October 22/23 1943", or "Summer 1987".
Place Description
particular place Aparticular placeis a current or historical specifically referenced geograph-ical entity. Examples are "the GDR", "reunited Germany", "Berlin", "Siberia",
"HH"59, or "Central Europe".
type of place Atype of placeis a general type of geographical entity such as "deployment locations", "villages", "inland", "coasts", "borders", or "industrial areas".
Event Description
particular event Aparticular eventprimarily includes natural "non-activities" such as "the aircraft accident [of 22 February 1988]", "the flood [of 1962 in Hamburg]", or the birth or natural death of a person if explicitly expressed in the text.
type of event Atype of eventincludes types of natural "non-activities" such as "natural disasters", "accidents", "flooding", or "diseases". The implicit reference by dates to the birth or death of a person are counted as types of event. Finally, type of event subsumes "conditions"(Zustände)or "temporary states of a thing or actor" such as "to be a guest at [someone’s house]", or "to be a resident of [a country]".
particular activity Aparticular activityis an activity intentionally carried out by an actor or in which an actor either actively or passively participated. Examples are
"the denazification (of [person name])", "the laying down (of a wreath of flowers)", "the population census", "the transfer of custody (of the files)",
"the trip [to France]", "the first meeting [of the AG]", or "the planning (for the ’Day of Potsdam’)".
type of activity Atype of activityis a general kind of activity such as "to raise official protest",
"nationalizations", "denazification [in Germany]", "social policy [in the GDR]", "party conferences [of the KPD on the Reichsebene]", "meetings [of the Reichstag]", or "granting [of Norwegian citizenship]".
Thing Description
particular thing Aparticular thingis, for example, "the medal [awarded to my grandfather]".
type of thing Atype of thingcould be, for example, "[Norwegian] ships".
59Stands for "Hansestadt Hamburg", hanseatic city of Hamburg.
Other Description
identifier The categoryidentifiersubsumes all kinds of citations, call numbers, titles, or other kinds of labels. Identifiers are often given in combination with particular documents.
general context The categorygeneral contextcaptures all things and phenomena which have not been further analyzed but which play an active or passive role within a given sphere of interaction or cultural and historical context such as things people do and which influence them, for instance, knowledge, behaviour, suffering, nature etc. Furthermore, statements of a subject or topic fall into this category. Examples are "philately", "the Nazi past", "the Stettin Question", "the establishment and history of the ’Day of the Stamp’", or "the biography [of a person]".
Figure12shows the total amount of occurrences for each primary category of given entities.
The importance of actors is evident with 609 distinct occurrences; that is, the sum of particular persons and groups and type of persons and groups, which amount to 37% of all given entities.
Times (specific time-spans and historical periods) and events (particular events and activities as well as types of these) are the second most important given entities, with 284 (17%) and 281 (17%) combined occurrences respectively.
Equally relevant are particular documents and types of these with 207 (13%) and particular places and types of such with 168 (10%) occurrences. Other entities (general contexts, identifiers and things) are provided as given entities only in few cases.
Figure 12– Groups of given entities per total sample (n=1656).
Figure13further details the sub-categories of the three primary ones,Actors,Eventsand Timesfor the whole sample.60Within the Actors category, particular groups with 233 (38%) and particular persons 228 (37%) are the most relevant occurrences. In the case of Events, particular events with only 2 cases are close to irrelevant (0.7%) while types of events with 63 cases are more important (22%). The remainder of occurrences in this category are distributed among particular activities with 114 (41%) and types of activities with 102 (36%) counts. Finally, 261 (92%) time-spans represent the largest group in the Times category with only 23 particular periods (8.1%) and “no type” of period.
60Note that all percentage values pertain to the respective primary category; that is, to Actor (blue), Event (green), and Time (yellow).
Figure 13– Detailed listing of the three largest groups of given entities per total sample (percent-ages given per primary category).
Figure14shows the primary categories of given entities per sample. The relative distribution per sample diverges significantly only in the case of actors where the sample from the German Federal Archives exhibits close to twice as many occurrences than the sample from the National Archives of Norway. This difference, which is not shown in Figure14, results primarily from a higher number of given particular groups in the case of the German Federal Archives sample with 204 occurrences equaling 41% of actors, versus only 29 occurrences in the case of the National Archives of Norway which represent only 25% of all actors.
Figure 14– Groups of given entities per individual sample.
The reason for this might be that the collected inquiries from the German Federal Archives sample appear to be more substantial in terms of the descriptive parts contextualizing their interest. Further, the users could be more proficient regarding which information is potentially relevant in the context of archival inquiries. This hypothesis might be further supported by the fact that, within the category of documents, the relative number of particular documents is significantly higher in the German Federal Archives sample – 84 occurrences which represent 58% of all documents versus 16 occurrences representing 25% of all documents in the National Archives of Norway sample – while, at the same time, the relative number of given document types is higher in the National Archives of Norway sample: 60 (42%) counts versus 47 (75%).
Furthermore, overall in the German Federal Archives sample, 71% of all given entities are particulars while in the National Archives of Norway sample this is the case for only 58%.
The users in the German Federal Archives sample might happen to be more knowledgeable or experienced and therefore able to provide more specific information in their inquiries. The second apparent difference between the given entities in the two samples is the absence ofThings from the German Federal Archives sample.