Types of sources

The sources for the extraction of verb phrases describing work activities—nearly 40,000 observations—consist of currently five types of sources: court records, account books, ego documents, petitions and certain types of registers.

Court records are the only source type that exists throughout the study period, 1550 to 1880, and activities from them are relatively evenly spread over time. References to sustenance activities found in court records thus constitute the backbone of our data set.