Tekijät

• Ruotsalainen, Esa (University of Helsinki. Faculty of Arts)

Asiasanat

cargo, communities, companies, freight transport, history, identity, marine traffic, newspaper press, sea transport, ships

Sisällön kuvaus

The data consist of four datasets compiled using content coding. The datasets focus on the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet, SOIC) operating from 1731 to 1813. The first dataset comprises newspaper content that mentions the Swedish East India Company (marked with letter A in the data file) and the second contains traffic information on ships in the port of Gothenburg (marked with letter B in the data file). The third dataset has more detailed information on the church notices selected from the first dataset (marked with letter C in the data file) and the fourth consists of church notices in Gothenburg newspapers in 1750, 1754 and 1765. The data were collected for a Master's thesis studying the characteristics of the SOIC in terms of its privileges, newspaper visibility and pamphlet debate. The researcher collected the datasets B-D to complement the main dataset A.

The first dataset containing the mentions of the SOIC in newspapers lists the name of the newspaper, date of publication, excerpt of the text, and the researcher's assessment of the author and text type. The researcher also collected information on how the trading company name was used, e.g. which possessive pronouns were used with it. The data contain 958 excerpts.

The second dataset charts the arrival and departure dates of shipmasters, their names, point of departure, goods imported, next destination, and goods exported. There are 752 entries in the data. The researcher collected the dataset to study the visits of British shipmasters in particular.

The third dataset contains detailed information on the church notices that were collected from newspapers for the first dataset. This detailed information include the name of the newspaper, date of publication, type of notice (banns of marriage or death notice), job title of the person mentioned in it, and the researcher's assessment of who had written it. There are 95 notices in the dataset. The researcher collected the data to study how occupation and employer was described in the notices.

The fourth dataset has the following information on church notices in Gothenburg newspapers: parish, date, type of notice (banns of marriage or death notice), gender of the person mentioned as well as their marital status, job title, employer, name, age, cause of death (for death notices) as well as similar information about the person's relatives. The dataset also contains notices about persons whose names were not stated, e.g. notices about a deceased wife. In such cases, the information is about the surviving relative, e.g. the widower. There are 1,174 observations in the data. The researcher collected the data to examine how frequently the notices referred to employer.

The excerpts from newspapers are only available in Swedish.