Dataset: Vallakohtu protokollid

(Municipal court session protocols)

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1. Access & allowed use

This dataset is provided for:

• ✔ hackathon research and prototyping
• ✔ visualizations and models
• ✔ presentations and demo publications

Not allowed:

• ✘ commercial reuse
• ✘ re-publishing raw data outside this repository
• ✘ attempts to identify real descendants or private individuals

Citation requirement

National Archives of Estonia. Court Files Crowdsourcing Initiative dataset, 2025.

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2. Data structure

Main file

data/raw/*.csv

• Delimiter: |
• Encoding: UTF-8

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Row represents

A single court session entry (protocol entry)

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Key fields

Field	Meaning	Notes
id	unique identifier	stable
year, month, day	date of court session	not date of incident
text	diplomatic transcription	contains structural HTML
comment	editor notes	uncertainties / clarifications
protocol_number	source entry reference	archival navigation
_record_type	archival classification	cataloguing category, not legal outcome
jury	participants with roles	Name-Role; Name-Role
person	primary litigant if present	empty if no parties
location	place mentioned	historical spelling
maakond	county	historical administrative unit
kihelkond	parish	ecclesiastical unit
vald	municipality	rural commune

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About the text field

The text field contains a diplomatic transcription:

• historical spelling preserved
• paragraph structure is meaningful
• HTML tags originate from the transcription environment
• language is not normalized

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About the jury field

The court composition is encoded inside the field, for example:

Jacob Rosenwaldt-Kirjutaja; Jaan Suurjaak-Peakohtumees

This allows reconstruction of institutional roles:

• peakohtumees (chief judge)
• kohtumees (judge)
• kirjutaja (clerk)

This is structured data embedded in a string.

Full data access

The full data is available here: https://liilia.kirmus.ee/s/SK4gTCBxH9QGqWn