Public lantern lectures in the Netherlands 1880-1940: A dataset based on historical newspaper advertisements

by Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves

Dataset with DOI at media/rep: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20855

Introduction

In February 1914, the Varsseveld department of the Association for the Promotion of Poultry Farming and Tame Rabbit Breeding in the Netherlands advertised one of their upcoming events in the local newspaper: a Mr. B. van Asperen Vervenne is announced to deliver a lecture at the local café Duitshof on the topic ‘How can one keep chickens and make a profit?’ (Fig. 1). The lecture would be ‘illustrated with the projection of lantern slides’ and admission was free for everyone.^[1] This was by no means an unusual occasion. In fact, while still largely unknown in the fields of media and cultural history, the public lantern lecture was once a ubiquitous phenomenon across urban and rural culture in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Netherlands (and elsewhere).^[2]

Labelled a ‘mercurial technology’ by lantern scholars Joe Kember and Richard Crangle, the lantern was used to educate and to entertain, as well as to inform or persuade a variety of audiences.^[3] Among the many uses of the lantern, public knowledge dissemination was certainly at the fore and this was one of the focal points of the research project Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880-1940, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).^[4]

To put it in today’s terms, these public lantern lectures could be described as a combination between a café scientifique, an occasion to engage with science and technology outside the traditional university lecture hall, with the media and entertainment dimension of the Ted Talk.^[5] In addition to practical and mundane topics such as raising chickens, a variety of speakers delivered lantern lectures to rural and urban audiences in a wide range of venues from countryside pubs to fancy concert halls. The dataset I have compiled, based on newspaper advertisements such as the one above, aimed precisely to assess the diversity and versatility of this knowledge communication practice in the Netherlands.

The ongoing digitisation processes of a large number of historical heritage materials, in particular of newspapers and other periodicals, are a fundamental resource for current media historical research.^[6] Digital archives, while having certain drawbacks (the material’s possible lack of contextualisation being one of the most obvious^[7]) have nevertheless provided unprecedented access to an umpteen number of primary sources, available at the fingertips of individual researchers, typing keywords into their OCR-based full-text search functions. In the Netherlands, historical researchers have been exceptionally felicitous with the much-loved Delpher platform, a particularly robust, digital archive developed by the Dutch Royal Library, which provides free access and full-text search options to millions of books, magazines, and newspapers, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.^[8]

But newspapers are not only a relevant source to investigate the reach of the public lantern lecture culture in the Netherlands due to, however fundamental, issues concerning accessibility and efficiency. Already in the late 1970s, Raymond Williams had noted that the relationship of the press with popular culture concerned the ‘often overlooked’ lecture format.^[9] And, more recently, Martin Hewitt has highlighted how newspaper coverage was an important part of the ‘public culture of the public lecture’.^[10] Along the same lines, Diarmid A. Finnegan has remarked upon the powerful ‘symbiosis’ between newspapers and public lectures, since lecture reporting was a powerful vehicle for transforming knowledge into news, while on the other hand reports were an important source of advertising for speakers.^[11] And Nico de Klerk’s research into lantern lecture reporting in the Dutch press has not only supported these insights, but also revealed how lecture reports were often ‘camouflaged’ summaries circulated by lantern speakers themselves.^[12] To that end, digital archives of historical newspapers present a very suitable opportunity for a first comprehensive survey of the public lantern lecture phenomenon in the Netherlands.

Data sources and methodology

One of the first aspects that needed further defining before starting the survey was to establish which public lantern lectures to include and which to exclude. In other words, since the research focused on knowledge transmission, what was to be considered knowledge? While excluding overtly political and religious topics (Fig. 2) as well as lantern performances directed at children, as per the Projecting Knowledge project description, I have nevertheless tried to make knowledge as inclusive a category as possible. This decision was based on primary sources. A good case in point is to consider one single page of what was known as a speakers list (sprekerslijst) (Fig. 3). In the Netherlands, a speakers list was published by an association in its newsletter or a booklet, usually in the late summer months, before the upcoming social winter season, which lasted roughly between October/November to March/April. This list featured the persons available for delivering public lectures, including their repertoire as well as details involving projection and transport. The page in question belongs to the speakers list of the Maatschappij tot Nut van ‘t Algemeen, Society for the Common Good, published in the summer of 1918. The range of topics that can be found on this single page includes fruit growing, prison sentences, modern bookkeeping, flora and fauna of the Dutch coast, aviation, South African literature, Persia, or the development of Dutch residential buildings.^[14]

Another fundamental issue was the selection of the most appropriate search term. In this case, again, preliminary research was needed. While tooverlantaarn is the literal Dutch translation of magic lantern, by the mid-nineteenth century the English term dissolving views or sometimes oxyhydrogen microscoop were commonly used for image projection in the Netherlands. However, at this time projections were still uncommon. By the end of the nineteenth century, when projection as a technology starts to become more accessible,^[15] lichtbeelden, which can be translated literally as ‘light images’, became the most common designation found in newspapers and other periodicals. The historical dictionary of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, Dutch Language Institute, explains the term as follows:

1. Image formed by light rays emanating from an optical system.
2. Specifically, an image as referred to in (1), brought to a screen by a device (a projection lantern) intended for that purpose. Used in this sense in the late 19th century.^[16]

This term was used well into the twentieth century. By 1920, the Dutch-English dictionary published by Wolters defined lezing met lichtbeelden as lantern lecture.^[17] A search in Delpher for the expression ‘met lichtbeelden’ retrieved a total of 124,513 hits, with the results peaking in the late 1920s and 1930s; however, by the 1960s, the term could still be found in the contemporary press (Fig. 4).

As I was looking for assessing the diversity and versatility of the public lantern lecture landscape, the survey needed to allow for variation, not only regarding geographical location, including both rural and urban environments, but also regarding a rather long period of time (1880-1940). At the same time, the sample needed to be sufficiently small to allow me to read every single result and decide whether it should be included or excluded and enter the information manually into the dataset. I decided to include all local and national newspapers available in Delpher at the time of the search (internal and external digital scans),^[18] but also all newspapers available through the portal Archieven.nl, which also allows for full-text keyword search in smaller, digitised rural or provincial newspapers in regional or municipal archives.^[19] The goal was to search the largest possible number of publications, but to then limit the results to newspaper advertisements, and not reports or reviews, that included the search term ‘met lichtbeelden’. This was possible for the internal scans in Delpher, since one can select between ‘advertentie’ (advertisement) and ‘artikel’ (article); for Delpher’s external scans I only make this selection visually, based on thumbnails, and the same for the portal Archieven.nl.

But even with this strategy, it was still difficult for me to individually comb through the many results for the expression ‘met lichtbeelden’; in these three sections, for the period 1880-1940: over 15,000 (Delpher internal), over 18,000 (Delpher external), and almost 10,000 (Archieven.nl), totally about 43,000. I therefore limited the search period to 1880-1926, since it corresponded to the period that showed a growing trend for the search term; between 1926 and 1940, the results stabilise and slowly decrease in number (Figs 4 and 5).^[20] It is, however, likely that the lantern was still used after this decrease in results, only that it was less advertised, which might rather mean that the lantern was something to be expected. For comparison purposes I selected a random collection of ads published between 1927 and 1940 to see if the same general characteristics – same kind of topics, organisers, venues – would still apply.^[21] This proved to be so.

For the period 1880-1926, I now had to read over 21,000 results and decide, first of all, if the topic matched the working definition of ‘knowledge’ mentioned above, therefore excluding overtly political or religious lectures, and then extract information systematically, such as date of the lantern lecture, location, venue, speaker, title of lecture and organiser, details that could be quickly gathered from a short advertisement, but which would be more time consuming to collect from longer reports (details which were also not always included in reports). I structured the data in a simple spreadsheet in Excel, using an event-oriented data model, meaning ‘a distinct happening defined by title, date and venue’, but also including other elements such as speaker (person) and organiser of the event.^[22] To make sure that sufficient information could be gathered about each lantern lecture in the dataset, I decided to only include ads which featured all the dataset entry fields, with a maximum of one field missing per ad (symbol * in missing field). Additionally, the results were restricted to single lantern lectures (one single event per record), thereby excluding the many courses (several events) organised by Volksuniversiteiten (popular universities)^[23] across the country, and which often featured projection. There were also ‘doubles’, several advertisements for the same event, in which case the most complete and legible result was selected. Another important issue for me was to be able to maintain a direct connection to the source from where the information was collected, therefore each entry includes a permalink to the newspaper advertisement.

Based on information extracted from the newspaper advertisement (Fig. 6), each lantern lecture constitutes one single record with the fields shown below (Fig. 7). The dataset comprises 4,638 records.

Results and discussion

While a more extensive (and media historical) discussion of the results is beyond the scope of this paper, there are some aspects that are nevertheless relevant to address, as they pertain directly to the particularities of the large-scale, bottom-up research that structured data such as this dataset enable.^[24] Taking my cue from the creator of the pioneering online database Cinema Context, Karel Dibbets, a dataset such as this has several potential uses:

first, identification and verification of historical facts (encyclopaedic use); second, counting and ranking of facts on who, what, when, and where; and third, complex statistical analysis to detect patterns or networks.^[25]

So far, I have mostly used the dataset in relation to the first two potential uses: to identify stakeholders and topics, and from there to search other sources based on the date or entities involved (such as a particular venue or speaker); and to perform simple counting and rankings, using Excel’s filters and pivot tables.

Counting and ranking presented a certain diffusion of the results. For instance, while it is possible to conceive of a top-10 or top-20 of the most active lantern lecturers (celebrity speaker Philips Christiaan Visser, diplomat and alpinist, something of a Dutch Roald Amundsen, tops the list with 73 entries in the dataset), 1,254 speakers delivered but one single lantern lecture, in a universe of 4,638 unique events. Only 62 speakers are recorded as having delivered more than ten lantern lectures. A similar picture emerges regarding the sites where lantern lectures were organised: 868 different locations were recorded, and while fourteen cities are listed to have hosted more than 100 lantern lectures (more than 300 in The Hague alone), 470 of these locations appear only once in the dataset. Female speakers are also represented in the results, although this is inferred by the accompanying Dutch title of Mevr. or Mej., regarding a total of 232 delivered lantern lectures; of course, it is possible that not all newspapers would include this courtesy title. However, the diffusion of the data is an important result in itself. It attests to the widespread use of this public knowledge transmission practice, from experienced speakers and organisers to novice organisers and unexperienced speakers, which is in line with other recent findings in lantern studies.^[26]

Other results, however, thwarted my expectations. An example are lantern lectures on art history; while there were certainly many lantern lectures in this field, their number was much lower than expected. In other words, art history was not a particularly prominent topic. I believe this expectation was based on the disproportionate interest of previous scholarship in the connection between the lantern and the development of art history as an independent field of research.^[27] On the other hand, it was surprising to find so many lectures on practical topics, such as how to maintain your chicken coop or care for your domestic plants, organised by associations dedicated to agriculture, gardening, or poultry. Again, this surprise probably resulted from the fact that I had never previously found this issue addressed in secondary literature. Importantly, this outcome contradicts the widely shared belief that public lectures were exclusive elitist activities organised by learned societies. The discovery of new, sometimes unexpected, insights is one of the great advantages of being able to work with a large (and as inclusive as possible) number of primary sources. As previous scholarship has argued, revisionist findings based on structured historical data can convincingly confront established historiographies.^[28]

I would also like to discuss certain challenges I came across while structuring the data. For instance, it is not uncommon for venues to change names over the years. One of the most popular venues for lantern lectures in the city of Haarlem was the Sociëteit Vereeniging which changed its name to Gemeentelijke Concertzaal when the municipality acquired the venue, and later Philharmonie.^[29] Sometimes, name changes were more subtle and revealed more personal details. For instance, the hall of Mr. Hofma in the northern town of Drachten became later known as the hall of Mrs. Hofma, widow (Mej. de Wed. Hofma).^[30] Other times it is necessary to consolidate the different names by which the venue of an organisation was known, even in different cities and towns.^[31] An example are the lodgings of the departments of the Maatschappij tot Nut van ‘t Algemeen, an organisation that comprised hundreds of departments throughout the country and was particularly active in organising public lantern lectures. While these venues certainly varied in size and configuration, from smaller meeting rooms to larger halls, they were nevertheless part of a larger infrastructure: consolidating a venue’s name in the dataset, that is, consistently using Nutszaal rather than Nutsgebouw or other variations, was one way to make the dataset coherent and to highlight this connection.

Another issue was that many Dutch cities had venues of the same name, although they were independent from one another. Venues named De Vereeniging, such as the one in Haarlem, could also be found in Nijmegen and Utrecht, with no connection between them. Harmonie was also a venue commonly found across the country. This alone is an interesting insight and the comparison between venues that operated under the same name, that (often) shared similar historical backgrounds, and hosted similar types of events – including lantern lectures – may well have implications for the study of lantern culture in the Netherlands.^[32]

Finally, I would like to discuss my attempt at coding the topics of lantern lectures. While I initially tried to create a reduced number of overarching types of knowledge to classify the topics mentioned in these advertisements, I ultimately decided against it. The reason was that I wanted to have the lowest degree of ‘editorial intervention’ and the highest degree of certainty for every record.^[33] And while the ads certainly indicated a lecture topic, it would nonetheless be difficult, and probably speculative, to tell how a speaker would approach that topic. I feared such conjectures could lead to distorted assessments. An example can be found in the lantern lectures of Amsterdam University Botany professor Theo J. Stomps. In January 1919, the Physics Association of Apeldoorn announced Stomps would deliver a lantern lecture on The Flora of the Caucasus and Armenia, based on a trip by the speaker.^[34]In the subsequent report, one can read that Stomps spent a rather considerable amount of time elucidating his audience on many travel details of his expedition.^[35] This is not particularly surprising since the travel trope was a very common and popular strategy for lantern lectures. However, it is difficult to know to what extent such a strategy could eventually eclipse the announced topic, particularly from the advertisement text alone. In that sense, coding newspaper reports might be a more productive effort.

Conclusion

Digital newspaper archives are without a doubt a wonderful resource for (media) historical research. Datasets built from these primary sources can provide new insights as well as offer the means for a critical revision of accepted perspectives. Full text keyword search in particular can be a valuable alternative to otherwise financially prohibitive and time-consuming research strategies. It is a powerful method for primary source-based, bottom-up research. However, while the size of the universe of sources has undoubtedly increased with ongoing digitisation processes, digitised newspapers are still only a fraction of published newspapers. A fraction, moreover, that the researcher has often little control over and is contingent on third party decisions, ranging from platform interaction design to the choice of titles to digitise. Additionally, in the case of public lantern lectures specifically, evidence suggests that other forms of publicity, such as posters and mailed newsletters, were important advertisement materials, too.^[36]

The idea for this dataset developed from a personal decision to structure my sources and working notes during my doctoral research. Without statistical or programming knowledge, I used a tool that I was familiar with (Excel) to perform simple actions. Extensive preparatory research – ‘what to search for exactly?’ – as well as contextual research – ‘what does this mean?’ – was done before, in parallel and after creating the dataset. A quantitative research analysis based on the results alone would most likely produce a somewhat distorted perspective of this historical phenomenon. Still, a survey like this does offer new and unexpected results and therefore constitutes a very good complementary source to qualitative research. Quantitative versus qualitative methods, overarching metanarratives versus microhistory approaches, technological versus cultural determinism, have long been discussed in connection with historical research, if only to arrive at the conclusion that a complementary approach might be the best solution.^[37] From my perspective, this does not mean that all historians should fall into the so-called ‘digital natives’ category, with extensive computational expertise.^[38] However, collegiate practices such as the systematic organisation of one’s sources into a structured, shareable dataset might be within the reach of many researchers. This would allow fellow historians to build upon or approach the data from different angles. That is certainly my hope for this dataset.

Author

Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves is a history researcher with a background in visual arts, design, and cinema. She is currently in the final stages of her PhD at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University, within the research project Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880-1940, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Her research project Science for the People is the first large-scale survey of the public lantern lecture as a cultural phenomenon of Dutch social life between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War.

Funding

This work is part of the research program Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880-1940’, with project number VC.GW17.079/6214, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

References

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[1] ‘Advertentie Vereeniging tot Bevordering der Pluimveehouderij en Tamme Konijnenteelt in Nederland’, De Graafschap-Bode, 24 February 1914: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:011151309:mpeg21:a0041. Varsseveld is a small village in the Dutch province of Gelderland.

[2] That is not to say that the lantern was not known in the Netherlands before the first decades of the twentieth century (cf. Da Rocha Gonçalves2020). Yet, while the second half of the nineteenth century has been deemed the ‘golden age’ of the lantern, recent research, including my own, has demonstrated that it is only by the turn of the century that the lantern becomes accessible to a growing number of stakeholders, and changes ‘from being an occasional treat for citizens to a pervasive presence within their everyday lives’. Kember 2020; Da Rocha Gonçalves 2023.

[3] Kember & Crangle 2018.

[4] This study was part of a wider research project investigating the use of the magic lantern in science communication and knowledge transmission in the Netherlands, titled Projecting Knowledge – The Magic Lantern as a Tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880-1940. For more information, please see the project’s website at https://projectingknowledge.sites.uu.nl/.

[5] Da Rocha Gonçalves 2013.

[6] cf. Musser 2015); Abel 2020.

[7] Jakobs 2021.

[8] ‘Wat Zit Er in Delpher?’, Delpher, accessed 5 September 2023: https://www.delpher.nl/over-delpher/wat-zit-er-in-delpher/wat-zit-er-in-delpher#7b8c9.

[9] Williams 1978.

[10] Hewitt 2012.

[11] Finnegan 2021.

[12] de Klerk (forthcoming in 2024).

[13] ‘Advertentie F. Domela Nieuwenhuis’, De Vrije Socialist, 12 February 1910: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMIISG07:000770013:mpeg21:a00008; ‘Advertentie Bijbellezingen’, De Rijnbode, 5 June 1915:https://proxy.archieven.nl/0/76866E02C39A43069C692DE98E87C3D6.

[14] ‘Lijst van Sprekers en Onderwerpen voor 1917-1918’, Nutswerk, August 1917: 4.

[15] cf. Da Rocha Gonçalves 2023.

[16] ‘Lichtbeeld’ in Historische Woordenboeken (Instituut voor de Nederlandse taal): https://gtb.ivdnt.org/iWDB/search?actie=article&wdb=WNT&id=M037079&lemmodern=lichtbeeld&domein=0&conc=true (accessed 8 September 2023).

[17] ten Bruggencate 1920.

[18] I have built this dataset between 2020 and 2022. However, new publications are frequently added to Delpher.

[19] This platform can be accessed at https://www.archieven.nl/nl/.

[20] It is important to note here that it is unclear what exact percentage of Dutch published newspapers can be found in Delpher at the moment. cf. Wijfjes 2017. For a current overview of all newspapers available in Delpher please see https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten.

[21] The reasoning for this collection involved selecting a random week (Monday to Sunday) of every month of the social winter season (October to March), every two and three years. Namely, the third week of October 1927, the second week of November 1929, the first week of December 1931, the fourth week of January 1933, the second week of February 1936, and the first week of March 1939.

[22] Van Oort & Noordegraaf 2020.

[23] I translate Volksuniversiteiten as popular universities for several reasons regarding their context of emergence in the Netherlands. Contrary to what their name suggests, they had no formal connection to universities, even if many university professors engaged with Volksuniversiteiten at an individual level. However, having university in its name was quite important, for it established a connection and a distinction at the same time. According to its mission statement, the Volksuniversiteit aimed to provide ‘higher education to all layers, not only the lower, but all, high and low, of the population’ by the organisation of courses which ‘linked the simple lecture delivered at Ons Huis with the scientific university auditorium lectures’. Prof. S.R. Steinmetz for instance, the most prominent figure of the first Volksuniversiteit, established in Amsterdam, was keen to compare the Volksuniversiteit to the Universiteit, declaring ‘the Universiteit (university) is a cooking school, the Volksuniversiteit (popular university) is a restaurant’. de Vries 1963; ‘Volks Universiteit’, Algemeen Handelsblad, 7 May 1913: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010651078:mpeg21:a0121.

[24] I explore the results further in my doctoral dissertation as well as in Da Rocha Gonçalves (forthcoming in 2024); Notebaard & Da Rocha Gonçalves (forthcoming in 2024).

[25] Noordegraaf & Lotze & Boter 2018.

[26] Kember 2020.

[27] cf. Fawcett 1983; Nelson 2000.

[28] cf. Van Vliet 2020.

[29] Bruyn 2005.

[30] ‘Advertentie Maatschappij Tot Nut van ’t Algemeen’, Dragtster Courant, 11 November 1914: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMTRES03:000843091:mpeg21:a00019; ‘Advertentie Maatschappij Tot Nut van ’t Algemeen’, Dragtster Courant, 1 November 1916:https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMTRES03:000846085:mpeg21:a00017.

[31] A more sophisticated approach in the form of a relational database could deal with this issue by keeping the variations under a single entity. Cf. Van Oort & Noordegraaf 2020: https://doi.org/10.1163/24523666-00502008; Noordegraaf & Lotze & Boter 2018.

[32] Da Rocha Gonçalves (forthcoming in 2024).

[33] cf. McVeigh 2020; Van Vliet 2020.

[34] ‘Advertentie Natuurkundige Vereeniging’, Nieuwe Apeldoornsche Courant, 15 January 1919: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMCODA01:000151443:mpeg21:a0014.

[35] ‘Plaatselijk Nieuws. De Flora van Den Kaukasus’, Nieuwe Apeldoornsche Courant, 21 January 1919: https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMCODA01:000151448:mpeg21:a0009.

[36] For instance, the physical archives of the Utrecht and Amsterdam departments of the Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algeemen, preserved at the respective municipal archives, feature many of these materials.

[37] Wijfjes 2017.

[38] Noordegraaf & Lotze & Boter 2018.