With the release of this BMGN issue, an article is published on BMGN.nl for the first time in a new HTML format. The article, by Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga, Sara Budts and Jeroen Puttevils, uses artificial intelligence to analyze 11,000 lottery tickets from the period 1446-1606.
This article explores the patterns in lottery rhymes produced in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries, with a focus on the rhymes written by women. The authors collected more than 11,000 digitised short texts from five lotteries held between 1446 and 1606. They have used GysBERT, a language model of historical Dutch, to identify distinctively male and female discourses in the lottery rhymes corpus. Although the model pointed them to some interesting patterns, it also showed that lottery rhymes written by men and women do not radically differ from each other.
Thanks to the HTML format, the website offers a comprehensive explanation of the digital research methods, and better visualization of the results. Three more articles using digital methods will be published in this manner during 2024 and 2025.
View this article in the latest BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review here.
The drawing of the 1592 lottery for the benefit of the Dolhuis. Amsterdam Museum.