Saturday, 17 February 2018

Visualising the Emigrant Letter‪ ARTICLE FREE ONLINE

Moreton, E., O’Leary, N., & O’Sullivan, P. (2014). ‪Visualising the Emigrant Letter‪. Revue Européenne Des Migrations Internationales, 30(3), 49–69.

This article is now freely available on line...

Specialists will recognise that there is, as it were, a 'ghost article' in there, waiting to be written - the more firmly Irish version of our work on Emigrant Letters, looking at our historiographic tradition, Arnold Schrier, Kerby Miller, David Fitzpatrick and so on.  This would also now look at more recent developments, which I still track - for myself and on behalf of Emma Moreton and her networks.  Yes, looking at our tradition, and specific Irish problems - always that issue of looking at only Irish material, in isolation.  So, also connecting with the wider literature, and with other interests of mine, like literacy/orality, writing as an exploration of the self, writing as a creation of the self, identities, language choices.

But it is nice to see that Revue Européenne Des Migrations Internationales (REMI) article online - and see how they have displayed the visual material.  Note all the work that goes into the creation of Digital Humanities visualisations.  One question for me, as we explored that Digital Humanities approach to Irish material, was:  Does all that work pay dividends, does it open up new approaches to existing research questions, and open up routes to new research questions?  The answer is, Yes.

Patrick O'Sullivan

Visualising the Emigrant Letter
Propositions pour une visualisation graphique de correspondances de migrants
Propuestas para una visualización gráfica de las correspondencias de emigrantes

Emma Moreton, Niall O’Leary et Patrick O’Sullivan


Emigrant letters are a rich resource for teaching and learning, transcending disciplinary and methodological boundaries. They are expressive and indicative of correspondents’ identities, values, preoccupations and beliefs, providing a powerful source of information about migration issues and shedding light on processes of language change and variation. Although many emigrant letter collections have now been digitised, not all are properly archived; some are reduplicated and others are in danger of being lost. The documentation and preservation of such letters is, therefore, a particularly pressing need. In 2013, an AHRC research network was established to look at ways of improving interconnectivity between digital collections of migrant correspondence. This paper reports on work carried out so far, focusing on how emigrant letter projects might move beyond the digitisation stage to exploit text content and enhance usability and searchability through the use of visualisation tools.

Index terms
Keywords :correspondance, lettres de migrants, TEI markup, outils de visualisation graphique, TEI, visualisation graphique de données, geotagging
Keywords :correspondence, emigrant letters, TEI markup, visualisation tools, TEI, data visualisation, geotagging

Further information, about policy - to make the contents of the journal available to a wide range of readers (researchers, teachers, students, etc.), and to promote the accessibility of the journal to the Anglophone public through the International Cairn platform...







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