The emigrant letter digitised: methods, tools and themes
Emma Moreton, Coventry University ()
This paper uses a mixed methods approach to analyse historical migrant letter collections. Specifically, it uses traditional historical sciences methods and digital humanities to explore letter-writing practices within the context of nineteenth-century mass migration to America, considering whether such practices would be relevant in digital interactions between dispersed migrant communities today.
Over the past few decades there has been a growing interest in migrant correspondence and how this type of material might inform our understanding of social history. Important studies of English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German, Swedish and Norwegian migrants, among others, have demonstrated the value of using personal letters to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of both the complex social processes of migration and the conditions and daily lives of the migrants themselves. The sourcing, preservation and documentation of historical migrant letter collections is now gathering pace, with the Internet providing a significant new forum for the dissemination of long-hidden archives. However, while the digitisation process has made migrant letters more accessible to academics and the general public, and project teams have been successful in tackling important research questions relating to social history and migration studies, relatively few projects have moved beyond the digitisation stage to enhance usability and searchability through the use of digital technologies.
This paper proposes a method of markup for capturing information relating to migrant correspondence, thereby allowing different archives to interconnect. It then demonstrates how digital tools can be used to visualise this metadata in various ways to uncover letter writing networks and the movement of individuals and groups over time. While the first part of the paper demonstrates how metadata relating to person, place and date can provide an overview of how dispersed families maintained contact, part two focuses on the content of migrant correspondence, suggesting a method for identifying and analysing topics and themes within the discourse. Three topics, in particular, will be examined: previous and future correspondence (‘I had a letter from Nannie a few days before I got yours’ and ‘I will be espectingMarys letter very soon’ [sic passim]); homesickness (‘I was heartbroken the other night I dreamed you was dead and I could not see you and you never left any message for me so I woke up crying’); and recollections (‘I have thought of Mother very much all through May I remember the prayers we used to say during May’). The paper will explore the function and significance of these letter-writing practices from a trans-historical perspective.