One of the projects I have been advising is beginning to come together nicely.
One part, an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded network, is now in place.
Below is a helpful outline by Emma Moreton, University of Coventry - this is taken from the Correspondence Corpora blog...
http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/correspondence_corpora/emigrant-letters/
P.O'S.
digitising experiences of migration
An AHRC Research Networking Project: ‘Digitising
experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letter collections’
Emigrant letters are expressive and indicative of
correspondents’ identities, values, preoccupations and beliefs; they are a powerful
source of information and understanding about migration issues, provide a
colourful picture of domestic life from an emigrant perspective, and shed light
on processes of language change and variation.
The sourcing and archiving of emigrant letter collections
are growing, providing a rich resource for teaching and learning which
transcends disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Letter collections are
of great interest to academics, schools, community groups and private
individuals who are interested in researching the lives and experiences of
letter writers.
The Problem
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. Additionally, emigrant correspondence
projects have almost always evolved independently of one another, and although
project teams have been successful in tackling important research questions
relating to social history and immigration studies they have rarely joined
forces, or engaged with stakeholder groups from other disciplines. Furthermore,
relatively few projects have moved beyond the digitisation stage to exploit
text content and enhance usability and searchability through the use of corpus
techniques and tools. Different letter collections cannot easily interconnect
if they are simply digitised without annotation and markup, and some search
pathways through the material will remain unavailable if software tools are not
employed to process this encoding.
The Solution and Approach
The aim of our research network is to bring together
various stakeholder groups working with emigrant letter collections to discuss
issues and challenges surrounding digitisation, build capacity relating to
correspondence annotation and the use of corpus tools, and initiate the process
of interconnecting resources to encourage cross-disciplinary research. Central
to this is the development of a system of correspondence annotation and markup
to represent the linguistic, structural, discoursal, contextual and physical
properties of the letters, thus offering different layers of meaning and ‘ways
in’ to the texts. This allows for more sophisticated searches, and also the
presentation of outputs through meaningful visualisations.
The Benefits
Our aim is to improve interconnectivity between existing
digital collections of migrant correspondence and develop a blueprint for
greater connectivity across a wider range of digitalised correspondence
archives. Through the exploration of new ways of organising, interpreting and
using various information, it seeks to improve access to digital resources for
use by academics, the general public, and a broad range of cultural and
creative industries. A key output of our work will be a much-needed set of best
practice guidelines for the digitisation and annotation of correspondence
collections.
The first network meeting will take place in Utrecht in
May 2013.
The main objective of this workshop will be to understand
and map out the linguistic, structural, discoursal, contextual and physical
properties of the letters that each stakeholder group is working with,
identifying where there is overlap and/or scope for cross-disciplinary
research, and any issues surrounding privacy and property rights. In this
workshop we anticipate exploring at least some of the following questions:
1) What do different researchers use correspondence
collections for?
2) What features of the letters do researchers consider
to be important and what common language can be used to express these concepts?
3) What possible barriers are there to increased
interconnectivity between correspondence collections and increased
collaboration across disciplines, and how might they be overcome?
More details to follow…
For more information please contact Emma Moreton:
emma.moreton@coventry.ac.uk
